Portrait de Pierre Mille
1937
oil on canvas
Collection of Musée d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

For a few years, China has taken from Europe her painting methods.

That renovation has been without tearing the character, personality and taste of the Chinese people.

Chinese oil paintings can now be in competition with European ones for their deep coloring and touch of complexity.

Nevertheless, they’ve kept their own precision and care for exactitude.

Yun has taken from France and Italy, what was convenient and useful while remaining essentially Chinese.

His new art shows his own personal vision.

The attempt is new and success is certain

~ Pierre Mille

My dear friend Pierre Mille who is a great French intellectual, in his youth he covered five continents as antiquarian, also was a French officer who knew modern politics; With his inner power, XX important First World War Correspondent of the Allied Army. His pen is known as his bayonet which has accomplished near a hundred publications. He particularly respected Lao Tze and Confucius philosophy. For Dr. Sun’s Reconstruction Principle he had great sympathy through all his publications and criticized the French in recent years as not on the right track. That proved his prophetic brilliance.

In the Village of Light, Paris, I was twice resident there and appreciate he was sympathetic to my Diamondism. For that reason often we would gather. His reputation and respectfulness is not overdone by the people. At the time of his death this poem of mine was written.

Who pull his fatherland back by fighting
I realize his full chest with literature,
Today the sadness has repeated.
Alas, your patriotic sacrificing
And I do not bear to raise my song —
Pressures me to depart
Our chorus in the Village of Light,
As the tailors weave their emotion to fit:
How come snow fell on the sprouts
our song has left behind?
With frightfulness, as I’m not a poet
and the sadness born.

Yun Gee 1940