1955. And so, the European Vera Schapiro, daughter, becomes the American Vera Shapiro, sister, who becomes Vera Torkanowsky, wife, who is now Vera Klement, individual. When I come out again on Fifth Avenue, I open my compact to check my new appearance. I lift up the flat round pad, somewhat grungy around the edges, and run it across my face and over my lips to give them a matte base over which to re-draw their fullness with the latest color in lipstick—a red so dark as to barely hold on to its redness. Then to reify my independent new personhood and my new name I walk to a jewelry shop on Fifty-Seventh Street and let them pierce my ears in a kind of primal ritual. Vera Klement

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

Art is a living entity that reflects the moment. There is no longer patience for the contemplative, slowly ripening, deepening vision that an artist may develop over a long span. There is no long span when money is the measure. Vera Klement

Ted Argeropoulos, the youngest member of THE FIVE [a group of five abstract artists of which she was a member], a gifted, prolific painter with high hopes and plans for his life as an artist, my dear friend Ted… was suddenly dead. I looked at the painting I had been working on for our exhibition, looked at the sky-blue undulations moving forward and backward and in deep sorrow and rage I mixed a flat, dead gray in one of my mixing bowls and slashed it across the blue—suppressing the illusion of volume, of movement, of aliveness. Vera Klement

I am appalled [now] that women permit the passing of restrictive laws with obscene stipulations that rule their bodies. Many states forbid abortions and birth-control. Abortion clinics are fewer and fewer and remain in danger of violent attacks. Will women again be forced to have illegal abortions in filthy back rooms without anesthesia, as I did when I was nineteen? Why don’t women rise up against this? Vera Klement

In my new job teaching art at the University [of Chicago], I wore jeans and gym shoes, and I rejoiced in being able to move about with the freedom of a man. I threw away the contrivances of torture—metal, bone and rubber, the curlers that pressed against my scalp at night, threw out the items that spelled sexy woman in magazines—items that knead and mold us into forms meant to be more feminine, but that were actually there to limit our movement, our freedom. Out they went. Exhilaration! There was a profound shift in psychological and philosophical thinking—a revolution of the mind that questioned the age-old social hierarchies, the ancient patriarchal authority. A shift that questioned, finally, what it meant to be human. Vera Klement

I looked out at the room [for a talk] full of strangers with anxiety. Then I thought of my consciousness-raising group, and suddenly I saw a room-full of warm and interested women, women who had come out on a dark night to hear me—to hear what I had to say. And I reached out to them, addressing each woman individually. I revealed myself to them, and for the first time in my life I was able to say what I thought, what I felt, without fear of judgment, in total control. I held the eye of one, then another as I spoke, sharing very personal things about my own work and life with these women who were eager to know me. Vera Klement