page_title: Guan Zilan
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Guan Zilan / Later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Chinese painter Guan Zilan
context_page_description: Guan Zilan, also known as Violet Kwan, was a Chinese avant-garde painter. She was one of the first artists to introduce Fauvism to China, and was known for applying Western painting style to Chinese traditional subjects. Her most famous work is Portrait of Miss L. Although an art world favorite during the late 1920s and the 1930s, she stopped painting after the onset of the Cultural Revolution and became mostly forgotten in Communist China.
context_section_description: During the Second Sino-Japanese War, when eastern China, including Shanghai, was occupied by the Empire of Japan, Guan's former teacher Chen Baoyi refused to work for the Japanese and fell into penury. Guan supported him financially until his death in 1945.
  Guan stayed in Shanghai after the Communists took over China in 1949 and lived on Liyang Road in Hongkou District. She worked at the Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History and became a member of the China Artists Association, changing her artistic style to conform with the socialist realism dominant in Communist China. She stopped painting altogether after the eruption of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. She was gradually forgotten by the Chinese public, although her Portrait of Miss L. was selected for exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1998. On 30 June 1986, Guan Zilan died of a heart attack at her home.
  In 2007, a box of old photographs from the 1920s and the 1930s were rediscovered in the basement of Shanghai's Wang Kai Photo Studio. The Xinmin Evening News published some of the photos, but misidentified Guan Zilan as the famous movie star Ruan Lingyu. The error was rectified when Guan's daughter saw the photos in the newspaper and recognized them as her mother's.
caption: Guan Zilan in 1932
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