

While flipping through Crass Art and Other Pre Post-Modern Monsters it hit me: This book should be called “Jubilant Decay.”



While flipping through Crass Art and Other Pre Post-Modern Monsters it hit me. This book should be called “Jubilant Decay.”

Gee Vaucher was born immediately after the end of WWII. Her childhood was ensconced in England celebrating the end of the war. That meant huge street parties and hugs and husbands back from the war with giant smiles on their faces. In the midst of all this glee, you had the photographic evidence of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki really was about (most just thought it was a big bomb). At the same time, the whole country was introduced to the horrors of the Holocaust.

So, while deciding to become an artist at a very young age, she could choose to capture all the excitement happening around her or dwell in the negative horror that the news kept reminding them about. She chose to do both and even today you can see this juxtaposition of horror and joy combined in all its beautiful weirdness.



Nothing sums it up like this one. Happy soldiers wrapped in their lover’s arms, with no face.

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The cover of “The Feeding of the 5,000.” Though Gee often does collages, the paintings that look like this are painstakingly done with a tiny brush and a solitary tube of black gouache. She used that same tube for all the Crass art, just diluting it to varying degrees to get lighter and lighter colors.

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That’s right. This was done with about a thumbnail-sized blob of black paint and nothing else.

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There’s always some vitriol in her paintings of the typical nuclear family. Maybe seeing all that carnage amidst her happy family made it all look like a big lie.

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Gee can paint in any style you like. She does photo realism perfectly, but can also pound out a hundred abstract nudes and even a paint-by-numbers. She doesn’t sell any of her work, but as I said earlier, has just started selling prints (thanks to Banksy). I can’t find the link for this one.

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Here’s the link for this one.

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This one’s for sale too.

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These could easily be photos from a bombed out home in Dresden.

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Gee’s latest work is focused on these 10′ high portraits of faces. The most recent one is a beautiful little girl with a strange scar that goes from her lip to the edge of the canvas (she wouldn’t let me photograph it, but it looks exactly like these).

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Crass Art and Other Pre Post-Modern Monsters the book is out of print and almost broke AK Press as it was their first full color book. If you can find one under $100, grab it. It’s the most thorough collection of her life’s work out there and, as far as I’m concerned, she’s the most talented artist living today.