Warehouse District

Although Grace Clements would focus her formidable artistic and literary intentions on Post-Surrealism or New Classicism later in her career, her work in the 1930's was largely architectural in subject matter. Warehouse District is a dynamic example the artist's structural collage style, where overlapping buildings become layers of color, shape and pattern. Though one can recognize telephone poles, trucks, fence posts and windows in the work, these elements yield to the abstract relationship of planes in space. (Ilene Susan Fort, Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West 1890-1945, Berkeley, California, 1995, p. 98) "Highly indebted to Cubism, [Clements] disassembled walls of buildings, bridges and other manmade objects and re-combined them into synthetic collage arrangements." (Independent Spirits, p. 98) Clements wrote about her work, "I am concerned with relationships because it is through relationships that we know reality. . . .A painting must contain its own order, hence its own reality. . . .The laws of the macrocosm are equally important in the microcosm. Our concept of the universe is necessarily abstract; our understanding of its order is likewise abstract." (as quoted in Independent Spirits, p. 98)