Vera Klement, whose boldly gestural art navigated between abstraction and German Expressionist-influenced figuration over the course of a career spanning seven decades, died October 20, 2023. Born December 14, 1929, in the Free City of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdańsk), she joked on occasion about having come from a country that no longer existed to make art that seemed without a place in the art world. Of course, this was an exaggeration by an artist whose work indeed suffered through periods of neglect but who also became a major influence on young artists in Chicago—especially women—through her studio practice and as professor of art (1969-1995) at the University of Chicago.

        Vera’s Jewish family were already once émigrés, from Russia, when they fled Gdańsk for the United States in late 1938, in the weeks following the Nazi-organized pogroms called Kristallnacht. In an essay published in the monograph accompanying Vera’s 1987 career survey at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, art historian and critic Dore Ashton noted the lifelong consequences of a refugee childhood,

        “[Vera’s art] comes as surely from the Holocaust as it does from New York’s Bohemia. Her memories of expulsion are as poignant … as those of painters throughout history who have always known the profound psychological meaning of that first Expulsion.”

        Vera and her brother, Leonard, grew up in New York City, where her mother, trained as a pianist at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, encouraged her to take music lessons. Her father, who died when Vera was fourteen, taught her how to paint. After graduating from Harlem’s High School of Music & Art in 1947, she attended college at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, graduating in 1950.

        Vera’s early career in New York City included significant recognition. By the time she was 25 years old, she had participated in group museum exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, and Dallas. Her woodblock prints were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1954, and she gained representation by RoKo Gallery in New York the same year. Writing about Vera’s woodcuts for the monograph accompanying her 1987 survey exhibit at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, Dore Ashton pointed out the influence of Edvard Münch and the German Expressionist printmaker Ernst Heckel on Vera’s art. In terms of a “fusion of structure and subject; the fact that the image would emerge from the material .…” She maintained this commitment to expressive materiality for the rest of her artistic life.

        Music, which played a large role in Vera’s upbringing, also factored in her two marriages—the first, briefly, to an Israeli violinist, and the second, to the composer Ralph Shapey, whom she met in 1957 while they were both artists-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony. They married soon after, and their son, Max, was born in 1960. The next few years in New York City were hard on the family, economically and professionally. Ralph had begun a self-imposed moratorium on performances of his music, later characterized as a kind of protest against “the rottenness of the world.” He turned to giving music lessons and taking on small ensemble visiting conductor positions. Vera faced an involuntary moratorium of her own during the radical transformation of the art world in the late 1950s to early 1960s, as a result of the arrival of Pop and then Minimalist Art. From 1960–1974, Vera had only a single solo exhibition. In 1964, Ralph accepted a position on the music faculty at the University of Chicago. Vera was the trailing spouse who was, in effect, a refugee yet again. This time, however, the shock of displacement also inspired her to take the artistic path for which she is best known.

        After arriving in Chicago, Vera felt like an outsider in relation to the circumstances for local artists at that time. Her art, referencing European and New York abstraction, was out of step with emerging Chicago Imagism, particularly the Hairy Who. Apart from inclusions in a couple of group exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Vera’s first few years in Chicago were ones involved with focusing on parenthood and on her painting. Her early Chicago works were the most abstract of her career and the paintings attracted the attention of local abstract artists whose feelings of alienation paralleled Vera’s own. From casual conversations and studio visits in the late 1960s, Vera, along with painters Ted Argeropolos, Martin Hurtig, Larry Salomon, and architect Lawrence Booth, formed The Five. Vera wrote the group’s manifesto and also approached people with responsibility for large public spaces (artist members of the group all worked at very large scale) to allow use of a lobby or reception area for temporary exhibits. The first show of The Five was in the lobby of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA), and the 10 x 20-foot painting that Vera installed there remained on view for many years. As the only woman in the group, and the least invested in abstraction as an end in itself, Vera left to become more involved with feminist causes in the Chicago art scene and beyond. Vera’s advocacy with The Five became melded with her feminist activism on behalf of women artists. She was one of the initial members of Artemisia, one of Chicago’s earliest women’s cooperative galleries, in 1973. It was also the site of her first Chicago solo exhibition in 1974.

        This period of more public social engagement was related to a key shift in Vera’s professional circumstances—full-time teaching in the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios. At the encouragement of art critic Harold Rosenberg, Vera applied for an adjunct position there in 1969, and after three years of part-time teaching, she became tenure track faculty, eventually rising to full professor.

        Many former students have shared stories of Vera’s close reading of their art, and the probing questions she asked about their intentions of their work. JoAnne Carson, who went on to a distinguished exhibition and teaching career of her own, praises the way Vera “seamlessly combined encouragement, critique, and unwavering support.” For his 2017 retrospective exhibit at the Chazen Museum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, another former student, Dan Ramirez, included several works executed at Midway Studios while being advised by Vera. Ramirez recalls how she worked to get him a Committee on Institutional Cooperation stipend that enabled him to study at the University of Chicago. “It (the CIC Fellowship) was a life-changing situation for me … as an artist and beyond. I’ve always considered her a close mentor.”

        Students who worked with Vera over the years acknowledge her appreciation of beauty in the world—against the grain, so to speak, of the conceptually driven art world. Carson shares a memory of a consequential episode of such admiration:

        “I recall one day when Vera arrived for an appointment, explaining that her lateness was due to a fender bender on Lake Shore Drive, brought about by her gazing at the color of the lake instead of the car in front of her. She marveled at the peculiar slate blue of the water, and seemed to feel that the accident was a small price to pay for such a moment of beauty.”

        The expressive palette Vera brought to her own work was joined to a repertoire of forms that appeared and reappeared over the years. In an interview with Lanny Silverman in 2015, for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Vera cited her personal lexicon of forms: “primal images: trees, landscapes, human bodies, and the vessel.” Among the vessel forms that appeared in her paintings were jars, urns, and boats.

      

  Earlier, James Yood, in “Vera Klement: A Vision Sustained,” an essay he wrote for the Renaissance Society, linked vessels and figures as the most prominent figural elements in Vera’s art. He cited Vera, in a 1985 conversation with artist John Himmelfarb, having this to say about the meaning of the vessel motif for herself:

        “The vessel is the most powerful moving object to me. It’s the one I have thought about the most, used the most …. I chose it as an archetype, a first creative work of [humankind], a primal shaping between the hands. I desire that shaping, that making of fullness again and again. It’s the womb, a female form, open, holding a container of light. But it’s also the world, spinning, the “Aleph” of Jorge Luis Borges, a ceremonial tea bowl, a cup of black milk from the poem [by] Paul Celan. Stroking it into volumetric illusion has never lost its excitement for me, like making a body.”

        In a February 1998 review in New Art Examiner, Stephen Longmire remarked on metaphors attached to Vera’s painted boats:

        “Over and over, Klement paints boats and swimmers in all their manifestations. The boats become bathtubs or coffins, the swimmers fish or birds. The journey is always the same, it need not be more specific. The swimmer crawls to land and embraces the trunk of a tree, from which another boat may be carved.”

        A boat is also a vessel, and from the child Vera who fled persecution by crossing an ocean, came the adult Vera who made a life out of restating the refugee trauma through which she lived. The impulse to look back is also a way forward, and Vera recovered into a fullness of life through the gestures in her art, each stroke propelling her symbolic vessel toward a shore.

Sometime Chicago artist Buzz Spector also writes about art. He currently lives and works in New York’s Hudson River Valley.