Lot 117: Grace Richardson Clements (1905-1969) Warehouse District (Los Angeles) 28 x 34 1/4in overall: 37 x 43in

Grace Richardson Clements (1905-1969)
Warehouse District (Los Angeles) signed and dated 'Clements 31' (lower right)oil on canvas28 x 34 1/4inoverall: 37 x 43inPainted in 1931
Provenance: H.A. Moe, Los Angeles, California.The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California.Private collection, Southern California.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 1930s was largely architectural in subject matter. Warehouse district is a dynamic example of the artists structural collage style, where overlapping buildings become layers of color, shape and pattern. Though one could recognize telephone poles, trucks, fence posts and windows in the work, these elements yield to the abstract relationship of planes in space. In the book Independent Spirits, Ilene Susan Fort writes "Highly indebted to cubism, [Clements] disassembled walls of buildings, bridges and other man-made objects and re-combined them into synthetic collage arrangements". Fort goes on to quote the artist from a show in 1944: "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".