Helen Gee; pioneering photo art dealer
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: By MARGARET LOKE NY Times
Helen Gee, whose Limelight photography gallery in Greenwich
Village in the 1950's became a pioneering blueprint for the
offering and selling of photography as an art form, died on
Sunday at a hospice in Manhattan. She was 85. Her death was
announced by a friend, John Erdman.
Spacious and well lit, the Limelight was started in May 1954
and supported by the adjoining coffeehouse. Although a
market in fine photographs was almost nonexistent, for about
seven years Limelight carried on as if there were one,
setting the standard for successors that came in a trickle
in the early 1970's and grew into a flood by the 1990's. Ms.
Gee mounted new shows at roughly five-week intervals and
wrote the news releases.
Two earlier galleries -- Alfred Stieglitz's 291 early in the
20th century and Julien Levy's in the 1930's -- had tried to
sell photographs but without success. Limelight did somewhat
better. An Atget show, with the prints made by Berenice
Abbott and priced at $20 each, was almost a sellout. More
than half the pictures in an Edward Weston exhibition, at
$75 a print, were bought. But rare photographs, photograms
and photomontages by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (priced between $100
and $200) failed to sell. Prints by Robert Frank ($25 each)
and Julia Margaret Cameron ($65 each) found only a few
buyers. Limelight was the showcase for a wide variety of
photographic styles, from classic straight photography
(Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham) to social documentary
(Brassai, Lisette Model, W. Eugene Smith) and subjective and
experimental work (Rudolph Burckhardt, Harry Callahan, Aaron
Siskind). Such a roster differed sharply from the generally
homogeneous fare found in popular picture magazines like
Life and Look.
Before opening Limelight, Ms. Gee had been a successful
retoucher of color transparencies. She briefly took
photography courses with Alexey Brodovitch, Model and Sid
Grossman. But what Ms. Gee lacked in coffeehouse experience,
she made up for in iron determination, familiarity with the
Village art and photography worlds, and personal charm.
In her 1997 memoir, ''Limelight: A Greenwich Village
Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the 50's''
(University of New Mexico Press), Ms. Gee recalled with wry
humor and unsentimental directness her struggles with
freeloading drug addicts, the lack of adequate help, the
threat of bankruptcy as well as brutish union officials.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Mary Cantwell
described how Ms. Gee ''had to survive a crooked contractor,
a plague of city inspectors, hours in the Bowery's
restaurant supply stores and an inundation of Seven Sisters
graduates and dropouts all looking to be doing 'something'
that would bring them closer to the arts.''
Helen Charlotte Wimmer was born on April 29, 1919, in Jersey
City. Her father, Peter Wimmer, had trained in Europe as a
church decorator. Settling in New York, he supported his
family by painting apartments.
At 16, Helen left home to live in Greenwich Village with Yun
Gee, a Chinese modernist painter she had met through an art
teacher. They were married in 1942. When Yun Gee,
subsequently found to be schizophrenic, threatened to turn
violent, Ms. Gee left with their infant daughter, Li-lan.
With a child to support, she taught herself transparency
retouching, which paid well. By the early 1950's, with
leading magazines and advertising agencies for clients, she
could afford a secretary, private school for Li-lan and
designer clothes. It was during a visit to the Museum of
Modern Art that Ms. Gee came across a photography show and
was instantly hooked.
Financial and labor pressures forced Ms. Gee to close the
Limelight's doors on Jan. 31, 1961. She then became an art
consultant and also started to revive interest in Yun Gee's
work. When the photography market began to heat up in the
late 1970's, Ms. Gee returned to photography, this time as a
curator, lecturer and writer.
In late 2001 and early 2002, Ms. Gee offered her collection
of photographs for exhibition and sale, first at the Stephen
Daiter Gallery in Chicago and then at the Sarah Morthland
Gallery in New York. Most of the prints had been given to
Ms. Gee by photographers whose work had appeared at
Limelight.
Ms. Gee's second marriage, to Kevin Sullivan, ended in
divorce. Besides her daughter, Li-lan Gee, an artist who
lives in Easthampton, L.I., she is survived by a sister,
Ellen Berland, of Warren, Conn., and a brother, Henry
Wimmer, of Bath, N.Y.