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. Art Guan was deeply influenced by Fauvism, while applying Western avant-garde painting style to traditional Chinese subjects. Her oil paintings use a high degree of simplification and abstraction, with rich contrasting colours. In Portrait of Miss L. (1929), her most famous work, she painted a modern woman in a Chinese qipao dress with a dog on her lap. Rather than painting an image of likeness, she turned the picture into a visual play by using broad strokes and vivid, flatly applied colours. The style is reminiscent of Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck. After media reporting of the rediscovery of Guan's photographs, her art began to recapture the attention of the Chinese public. In January 2012, her oil painting Flowers in a Vase was sold for . Family Guan Zilan had a daughter named Liang Yawen (梁雅雯), and a grandson Ye Qi (葉奇), who is a photographer. References External links 12 of Guan Zilan's paintings from 1928–1966 1903 births 1986 deaths 20th-century Chinese painters 20th-century Chinese women artists Chinese women painters Fauvism Painters from Shanghai Republic of China painters Chinese expatriates in Japan