Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1936
Grace Clements [1905-1968], 1990, 1936
"An ardent proponent of modernism, artist and critic Grace Clements sought to awaken Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s to vanguard modes of expression. Born in Oakland on June 8, 1905, Clements trained in New York from 1925 to 1930 with Kenneth Hays Miller and Boardman Robinson. In 1931, she moved to Los Angeles and shortly thereafter received a solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . . .
"More socially conscious than the other Post-Surrealists, who held art apart from politics, Clements applied the movement's tenets to the contemporary scene. In the March 1936 issue of Art Front, a vehicle of the American Artists' Congress to which she belonged, she published an article entitled New Content-New Form in which she castigated "ivory tower" formalism and Surrealist automatism and argued for an art that addressed social issues in a language which the public could understand. . . . Opposed to naturalism, which merely mimicked appearance, she advised artists to emulate techniques of the movies such as filmic montage.
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"During the years of the Depression, Clements served as a painter and muralist on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. With Helen Lundeberg she painted murals in Venice High School and fashioned a series of mosaics for Bancroft Junior High School in Los Angeles and the Municipal Airport of Long Beach. . . ."
"She corresponded with Peter and Rose Krasnow after she had left Southern California in the late 1940s."