Helen Gee (curator)

Helen Gee (1919–2004) was an American photography gallery owner, co-owner of the Limelight in New York City, New York from 1954 to 1961. It was New York City's first important post-war photography gallery, pioneering sales of photographs as art.

In the late 1970s, Gee worked as a photography curator, lecturer and writer.

Life and work Gee was born Helen Charlotte Wimmer on April 29, 1919 in Jersey City, New Jersey, to father Peter who had been trained as a church decorator before he migrated from Austro-Hungary. Gee's mother Marie (née Ludwig) died during her infancy, and her widower brought up Helen and her older siblings Ella and Henry alone. Rebelling against her father's new wife who had Nazi sympathies, They married seven years later in 1942 and had a daughter, artist Li-lan in 1943, and were subsequently divorced in 1947 and in 1956 she traveled briefly to Spain and France with Li-lan after the two had won a television competition. With initial assistance of her sister Ella and brother in-law, she took a ten-year lease at a very low $225 a month on a building on Seventh Avenue South and Barrow Street. Nevertheless, the group show Great Photographs sold nearly half of its 45 pictures on exhibition. Philippe Halsman, Cornell Capa, Weegee (whom Gee banned),

Limelight exhibition chronology In her gallery Helen Gee organised and presented these sixty-one exhibitions: Alfred Stieglitz / Dorothy Norman, Portraits of Each Other, April 19-May 7 Dan Weiner, Italy, May 10- June 7 Suzy Harris, June 10- July 25 Group show: Fourteen Photographers, July 28- September 2 Wynn Bullock, September 5- October 8 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, October 11-November 19 Édouard Boubat, November 22- December 31

1956 Leon Levinstein, New York, January 3-February 11 Ansel Adams, February 14-March 31 Esther Bubley, April 3-May 5 Imogen Cunningham, May 8-June 25 Sabine Weiss, June 28-July 29 Footlights and Spotlights:Theatrical Photographs of the American Stage, 1860- 1900, loan exhibition from George Eastman House, August 1- September 19 Ken Heyman, September 21-October 28 Dan Weiner, South Africa, October 30-December 2 Eugène Atget, December 4-January 6

1957 Izis, January 8-February 17 Frank Paulin, February 19- April 2 Eliot Porter / Ellen Auerbach, Madonnas and Marketplaces, April 4-May 19 Elliott Erwitt, May 24-July 7 Morris H. Jaffe, July 9-August 18 Lyrical and Accurate, loan exhibition from George Eastman House, designed by Minor White, August 20- September 28 W. Eugene Smith, October I- November 10 John Cohen, Peru, November 12-December 15 Berenice Abbott, Portraits of the Twenties, December 17- January 26

1958 David ["Chim"] Seymour, Chirn's Children, January 28- February 25 Rudolph Burckhardt / George Montgomery, February 27- April 10 Ken Heyman, Bali, Japan, Hong Kong, April 12- May 25 Bert Stern, May 27-July 20 James Karales, Rendville, USA, July 24- August 31 Group show, September 3–30 Harold Feinstein, October 2-November 15 Gerda Peterich, Dance Portraits November 18- December 31

1959 Robert Doisneau, January 5-February 28 Harry Lapow, March 3-April 12 Dan Weiner, Russia and Eastern Europe, April 14-May 12 The History of Photography, loan exhibition from George Eastman House, May 15-June 30 Group show: Seven Europeans, July 2- August 13 Group show: Images of Love, August 15-September 30 Brassaï, The Eye of Paris, October 5–31 Group show, November 2- December 13 Louis Faurer, December 15-January 18

1960-1 Photographs by Professors: Lou Block, Van Deren Coke, Allen Downs, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, Henry Holmes Smith, and Minor White, January 19-February 29 Ralph Hattersley, March 1–27 Jerry Liebling, April 1-May 15 Edward Weston, May 17-June 26 Gordon Parks, June 28-August 7 Jack Smith, August 9-September 11 Group show, September 13-October 16 Claudia Andujar, October 18-Novernber 8 Paul Caponigro / Minor White, November 10-December 14 Julia Margaret Cameron, December 16, 1960 – January 31, 1961

Exhibitions about Limelight

1977 Helen Gee and the Limelight: A Pioneering Photography Gallery of the Fifties, Carlton Gallery, New York, February 12-March 8, 1977. 2001 Helen Gee and the Limelight: The Birth of the Photography Gallery, 1954-1961 Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago. 2007 Limelight Gallery and Coffeehouse, 1954-61, Triple Candie Gallery, 500 West 148th Street, New York, New York, Feb 8 - March 18, 2007.

Cover of the 2016 Aperture edition of Helen Gee's autobiography illustrated with a portrait by Arthur Lavine of Gee on her way to the opening of her gallery.

Limelight: A Memoir In 1997, Gee published her autobiography, itself titled Limelight: A Memoir, reissued in 2016 by Aperture with an introduction by Denise Bethel (formerly Chair of Photographs and Americas, Sotheby's New York). Covering mostly her creation and running of Limelight Gallery, the book provides contemporary insights—and gossip—about the society of Greenwich Village of the period, into the lives and personalities of a number of important photographers including Lisette Model and Robert Frank, notes the effect of McCarthyism on artists' output, and provides a balanced appraisal of Edward Steichen's The Family of Man which launched at the Museum of Modern Art the year following Limelight's opening, and increased attention to the medium.

Later career Gee married Columbia University professor, Kevin Sullivan, in 1959. a reconstruction of the Photo-Secession exhibition held March 5–22, 1902 at the National Arts Club, New York, for the New Jersey State Museum and the touring Photography of the Fifties: An American Perspective, for which she wrote the catalogue essay,

Helen Gee died of pneumonia on October 10, 2004, in Manhattan, New York, N.Y.

Gee's archive of her work and records pertaining to the Limelight Gallery are located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

Publications Limelight: a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties: A Memoir. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997. . Limelight: a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the 1950s. New York: Aperture, 2016. . With an introduction by Denise Bethel. Gee, H. (1991). 'Limelight: Remembering Gene Smith'. In American Art, 5(4), 10–19. Stourdzé, S., Gee, H., Coleman, A. D., & Levinstein, L. (2000). Leon Levinstein. Paris: Scheer.