Even so I managed to learn some valuable lessons at the Chelsea studio [working for Nahum Tschacbasov]. For one, I resolved never to become embittered by the lack of success or not making it. I would live inside the work, inside the working as my way of life. If I was to receive any gain from the work—awards, praise or money—it would be a by-product. Gravy. If there was no response, so be it. An attitude hard to maintain in such a pressured, competitive system. But looking back, I believe I’ve managed to do that for more than sixty years. Vera Klement

Around that time two folders arrived from Paris addressed to me. They held reproductions of the paintings of Van Gogh and Matisse. My French cousin Freddy had learned from my gentle mother’s letters that she had sent him after the war years, that I was a budding young artist. I have the folders still, stained and dog-eared—they are my first loves, my first exemplars, sent to me by my handsome French cousin from the City of Art. They became the models for my self-education as I painted my own clumsy versions of the fluid Matisse and the groping Van Gogh, painted on shirt cardboards at my “lady’s desk” in the corner of the narrow entry of our apartment on 136th Street. And I knew with absolute certainty that I would be doing this for the rest of my life. Vera Klement

In my senior year [at the High School of Music and Art], our art teacher, Mr. Bloomstein—fondly called Bloomie—introduced our class to Cubism—Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris. He’d set up a still-life for the class and suddenly I was released from “getting an idea.” I let my eyes roam over the still-life, and I drew lines that broke down the rudimentary forms of bottle and glass, and filled in the resulting facets with subtle shifts of color. Mr. Bloomstein sent me a note—Congratulations! How much you have grown! Vera Klement

It was on one of those walks to Lydia’s house [her friend in New York]—I must have been thirteen—that I suddenly understood that the world was an untended place. The ground that I had thought to be mine had been torn out from under me, leaving me with an uncertain hold on the new surface. And now, walking past the jumble of shops on Broadway, I understood with a cold finality that there was no God, no Being in a blue heaven that created order, no one to pray to, to protect and guide me. …I was alone... Vera Klement