Essays
from the 2009 Rockford Art Museum's catalogue Vera Klement - Paint
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Vera Klement: An Appreciation.
Vera Klement's art matters because life matters. Though it may appear that we live in a moment that privileges cleverness and irony over introspection and metaphor, there remain artists who approach their work as a ceaseless process of discovery and experience, who ruminate and who remember. Artists such as Vera Klement ask in their art what perhaps more of us should ask in our lives-why are we here, what does my place in the world mean, what are these things that I feel, what is my relationship to nature, what is this rapture and despair, how can I make sense of history and culture, how is my journey through life both unique and part of some larger process? No one, of course, can fully answer such questions or the many others we experience when looking at the paintings and works on paper of Vera Klement. But it is the dignity of her search that we celebrate in an exhibition such as this, the bursts of self-knowledge and truth embedded in these images, the hard-won moments of revelation they offer us, their gift of letting us touch another human mind.
Klement's journey to these works is itself a dramatic one. Born in the Free City of Danzig (today, Gdansk in Poland) she left her homeland as a child with her family a few steps ahead of the impending Holocaust. Raised in New York City, as a young artist she watched and worked at the edge of Abstract Expressionism, a witness to one of the great moments in the history of American art. Her move to Chicago in the 1960s and her long and distinguished career as an artist and professor at the University of Chicago led her to play a key role in the development of one of America's major art centers, and her impact on our region as artist and teacher has been vast.
Like all lives, hers has been a patchwork of events, relationships, personal histories, moments of exhilaration and sorrow, episodes in an ongoing narrative keyed around a distinct sensibility. But unlike most lives, that pattern of disparate accretion, of juxtaposing seemingly independent elements in perpetual dialogue, has become the touchstone of Klement's art. Whatever else her art is, it is additive, sometimes starkly so, with elements brought together onto often huge canvases, things that are both seen singly and presented in allusive conjunction. These are often physically diptychs or triptychs or the like, but only tenuously so, large areas of canvas are often painted white, and her elements congregate psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, while never sharing the same integrated physical space. Smaller bits of painted canvas are often attached to larger ones, Klement's imagery is always presented as distinct, isolated, yet at the heart of her work is how she brings several of these elements together, inviting their integration to take place in our mind. And that imagery! Klement ceaselessly explores a repertoire of elements, certain visual touchstones she chooses to return to again and again, surprisingly flexible characters capable of infinite nuance and calibration. The vessel, the landscape, the figure-usually female, but sometimes not-flowers, the window, the tree, the brick wall, these and more can brood or exalt in her hands, can be turned toward ecstasy or dread, depending on what they abut, how she realizes them, and the precise emotional temperature she desires to explore.
James Yood
Visiting Professor, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism;
Director, New Arts Journalism Program, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago;
Contemporary art critic, Artforum magazine
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Vera Klement: An Appreciation.
Vera Klement's art matters because life matters. Though it may appear that we live in a moment that privileges cleverness and irony over introspection and metaphor, there remain artists who approach their work as a ceaseless process of discovery and experience, who ruminate and who remember. Artists such as Vera Klement ask in their art what perhaps more of us should ask in our lives-why are we here, what does my place in the world mean, what are these things that I feel, what is my relationship to nature, what is this rapture and despair, how can I make sense of history and culture, how is my journey through life both unique and part of some larger process? No one, of course, can fully answer such questions or the many others we experience when looking at the paintings and works on paper of Vera Klement. But it is the dignity of her search that we celebrate in an exhibition such as this, the bursts of self-knowledge and truth embedded in these images, the hard-won moments of revelation they offer us, their gift of letting us touch another human mind.
Klement's journey to these works is itself a dramatic one. Born in the Free City of Danzig (today, Gdansk in Poland) she left her homeland as a child with her family a few steps ahead of the impending Holocaust. Raised in New York City, as a young artist she watched and worked at the edge of Abstract Expressionism, a witness to one of the great moments in the history of American art. Her move to Chicago in the 1960s and her long and distinguished career as an artist and professor at the University of Chicago led her to play a key role in the development of one of America's major art centers, and her impact on our region as artist and teacher has been vast.
Like all lives, hers has been a patchwork of events, relationships, personal histories, moments of exhilaration and sorrow, episodes in an ongoing narrative keyed around a distinct sensibility. But unlike most lives, that pattern of disparate accretion, of juxtaposing seemingly independent elements in perpetual dialogue, has become the touchstone of Klement's art. Whatever else her art is, it is additive, sometimes starkly so, with elements brought together onto often huge canvases, things that are both seen singly and presented in allusive conjunction. These are often physically diptychs or triptychs or the like, but only tenuously so, large areas of canvas are often painted white, and her elements congregate psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, while never sharing the same integrated physical space. Smaller bits of painted canvas are often attached to larger ones, Klement's imagery is always presented as distinct, isolated, yet at the heart of her work is how she brings several of these elements together, inviting their integration to take place in our mind. And that imagery! Klement ceaselessly explores a repertoire of elements, certain visual touchstones she chooses to return to again and again, surprisingly flexible characters capable of infinite nuance and calibration. The vessel, the landscape, the figure-usually female, but sometimes not-flowers, the window, the tree, the brick wall, these and more can brood or exalt in her hands, can be turned toward ecstasy or dread, depending on what they abut, how she realizes them, and the precise emotional temperature she desires to explore.
James Yood
Visiting Professor, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism;
Director, New Arts Journalism Program, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago;
Contemporary art critic, Artforum magazine
How
does Vera Klement achieve the mysterious, alchemical transformation of
formless paint substance into an image that has lasting power in the memory
of a viewer? To begin with, Klement is totally at home with the language
of painting, a language who’s many varied dialects she speaks fluently
and directly - requiring no translation. She has had the good fortune
to have spent her coming-of-age years as a young artist in New York during
the late forties and fifties – when painters broke free of tradition and
experimented with countless new ways of using paint and form. Klement
learned a great deal from these masters, and developed a wide-ranging,
inclusive vocabulary.
Her paintings are often composed of several varied techniques, each of which would take most painters a lifetime to master. These might include an improvised gesture that is ‘thrown’ or spilled onto the canvas lying on the floor falling miraculously on the unforgiving white of the canvas in just the right way – or perhaps areas of very controlled, even rigid, abstract geometries. Carefully layered representations of figurative elements may be brought into the painting that are built up to create the illusion of mass and weight in an almost sculptural way – sometimes there areas of stark drawing in charcoal or graphite or collaged sections of papers that show remnants of a former life – frottaged (rubbed) against various surfaces, torn and glued onto the canvas in the service of a new, complex composition. A splatter of paint that is simply paint can be juxtaposed with the refined, expressive drawing of a hand, open against areas of gloriously saturated color. Klement follows the modernist dictum of the flatness of the surface even as she violates it. This sends the viewer’s eye deep into space to the distant horizon, and then forwards again – to build an object whose roundness pokes a hole in the flatness, allowing it to exist in its own fullness.
There is an audacity with which she places paradoxically different objects on the same field – each deftly applied with bold technical virtuosity, each careful held in tension to the other. The inquisitive viewer finds a fecund female torso with a pile of fresh-green apples over a sliver of sea. Or perhaps, a manured cornfield covered in snow – juxtaposed with a bathtub. It is with these varied methods and the mysteries of her paradoxical images that are masterfully distilled down to a single potent image. These images avoid resolution or closure – leaving the paintings in a dynamic balance – keeping the question of their meaning open, stretching out their ever renewing life span.
Ingrid Fassbender
Director, Fassbender Fine Art
Independent Curator
Her paintings are often composed of several varied techniques, each of which would take most painters a lifetime to master. These might include an improvised gesture that is ‘thrown’ or spilled onto the canvas lying on the floor falling miraculously on the unforgiving white of the canvas in just the right way – or perhaps areas of very controlled, even rigid, abstract geometries. Carefully layered representations of figurative elements may be brought into the painting that are built up to create the illusion of mass and weight in an almost sculptural way – sometimes there areas of stark drawing in charcoal or graphite or collaged sections of papers that show remnants of a former life – frottaged (rubbed) against various surfaces, torn and glued onto the canvas in the service of a new, complex composition. A splatter of paint that is simply paint can be juxtaposed with the refined, expressive drawing of a hand, open against areas of gloriously saturated color. Klement follows the modernist dictum of the flatness of the surface even as she violates it. This sends the viewer’s eye deep into space to the distant horizon, and then forwards again – to build an object whose roundness pokes a hole in the flatness, allowing it to exist in its own fullness.
There is an audacity with which she places paradoxically different objects on the same field – each deftly applied with bold technical virtuosity, each careful held in tension to the other. The inquisitive viewer finds a fecund female torso with a pile of fresh-green apples over a sliver of sea. Or perhaps, a manured cornfield covered in snow – juxtaposed with a bathtub. It is with these varied methods and the mysteries of her paradoxical images that are masterfully distilled down to a single potent image. These images avoid resolution or closure – leaving the paintings in a dynamic balance – keeping the question of their meaning open, stretching out their ever renewing life span.
Ingrid Fassbender
Director, Fassbender Fine Art
Independent Curator