Clement Haupers (1900 - 1982)

 

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Clem Haupers is today recognized for his facility with color, a reputation that was perpetuated in the work of his most famous student, the flamboyant colorist LeRoy Neiman. Although Haupers never reached the level of recognition that Neiman achieved in the 1970s, he nonetheless built a solid reputation as one of the premier landscape painters of his home state.

 

Haupers studied in Paris with the Cubist painter André Llote, who adhered to certain radical tenets of Cubism while refusing to break entirely with traditional vision, maintaining instead the intelligibility of the subjects he painted. Haupers seems to have adopted aspects of Llote’s approach. He builds his compositions on geometry but does not fracture the object into interpenetrating planes.

 

Upon completing his studies in France, Haupers returned to Minnesota where he became an influential teacher at the St. Paul School of Art, specializing in several media including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. He rose to prominence in 1935 as the state and regional director of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project in Minnesota, which helped re-stimulate the flagging art communities of the Twin Cities by hiring unemployed artists to decorate public buildings and parks.  He also was Director of the Fine Art Department for the Minnesota State Fair from 1930 to 1941.

 

His works hang in collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The New York Public Library, The Minnesota Historical Society, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, as well as Museums in San Diego, Dallas, Philadelphia, and many other public and private collections.

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Clement Haupers is featured, along with three other renowned Minnesota artists (Dewey Albinson, Cameron Booth, and Elof Wedin), in a book entitled "Minnesota Modern - Four Artists of the Twentieth Century."  This beautiful book, published by Afton Press, is available for purchase at Gallery 5004.