During Lee’s Paris period (December 1958)

Flight to Paris (1958-59)

In 1957, World House Gallery in New York presented Ungno’s paintings, ‘Sailing’ and ‘Mountains’ in its <korean contemporary art> exhibition. Soon after, the two paintings were donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York through the Rockefeller Foundation. This greatly encouraged Goam to get into the international art scene. In 1958, Jacques Lassaigne, who served as the head of the French branch of the International Association of Art Critics at that time, invited Ungno to Paris. Ungno was 54 years old then. His flight to Paris to have an exhibition in the heart of the Western art world made headlines in most of the daily newspapers in Korea. Many artists wrote about the exhibition, <goam, <a href="/entity/m0qfsyq4" data-gacategory="annotation" data-gaaction="clicked" data-galabel="assetpage_injected_link_v1">Lee Ungno: flight to France >, which was held in 1958 at the public information office in Seoul, for the papers day after day.

Under the recommendation of Dr. Hertz, who at the time was the West German ambassador to Korea, Goam headed to Germany only a week after he arrived in Paris. Many local papers reported his exhibition in the main section as the first Korean modern art exhibition in West Germany. For a year, he travelled three German cities – Frankfurt, Cologne and Bonn – to have four exhibitions and returned to Paris.