Gloucester, 1919 by Clara Deike
Gloucester, 1919 by Clara Deike
Clara Deike (American, 1881 - 1964)
Signed: Clara L. Deike (Lower, Right)
" Gloucester ", 1919
Watercolor and Gouache on Paper
Sight Size: 20" x 23 1/4"
Housed in a Period Carved Frame
Overall Size: 25 3/4" x 29"
In very good original condition.
Understanding the Painting
Executed in a highly interpretive modernist manner, this watercolor and gouache landscape demonstrates Clara Deike’s sophisticated understanding of color, structure, and atmospheric simplification during the formative years of American modernism. Deike transforms the coastal landscape of Gloucester into a rhythmic arrangement of flattened forms and luminous color relationships. Broad passages of saturated blues, violets, pinks, and greens are used structurally, guiding the viewer’s eye across the composition while creating a heightened emotional and atmospheric effect.
Particularly notable is Deike’s use of intense blue and violet contouring around rocks, shoreline forms, and tidal patterns, reflecting the influence of her teacher, Henry Keller, and his well-known “blue outline” technique. This approach allowed artists associated with the Cleveland School to create spatial depth and visual vibration through color contrast. The painting balances transparent watercolor washes with more opaque gouache passages, producing both luminosity and solidity within the composition.
Although grounded in observation, the work moves beyond straightforward landscape representation into a more progressive modernist language influenced by Fauvism and early abstraction. The foreground, in particular, becomes increasingly geometric and fragmented, with tidal pools and rocky terrain reduced into interlocking planes of expressive color. The result is a painting that captures not only the physical landscape, but also the sensation and energy of light along the Massachusetts coast.
This work represents an excellent example of early 20th-century American modernist watercolor painting and reflects Clara Deike’s important role within the progressive Cleveland art movement of the period.
Artist Biography
Born in Detroit, Clara Deike attended Central High School in Cleveland and graduated from the Cleveland Normal School in 1901. She taught in elementary schools in Ohio and Kentucky until 1909. During the summer of 1909 she studied at the Chicago Art Institute. In the fall of that year, Deike enrolled at the Cleveland School of Art, where Henry Keller and Frederick Gottwald were among her teachers. After graduation in 1912, she taught art at Lakewood and Central High Schools until her retirement in 1945.
Deike avidly pursued summer study, first at Henry Keller's Summer School in Berlin Heights, Ohio (1910-1920), and at Provincetown, Maine (1918). In 1912, Deike co-founded the Women's Art Club of Cleveland. From 1921 to 1923, she studied with Hugh Breckenridge in Gloucester, and also at the Cleveland School of Art. Awarded a sabbatical in 1925-26, she traveled to Germany to study with modernist painter Hans Hofmann. Deike then studied with Diego Rivera over the summer in Mexico. She exhibited her work widely and received numerous awards, especially from the May Show exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
A committed modernist, Deike's work is a balance of contradictions. As early as 1912, she began exploring Henry Keller's technique of the "blue outline," a method of creating three-dimensional space form by surrounding large, flat shapes with intense blue or purple. During the 1920s, she introduced more rigid structure into her compositions, often wedding intense Fauve color to geometric shapes derived from Cubism. During the 1940s Deike began breaking up forms and allowing fragmented geometric shapes to interpenetrate and merge. Although relatively obscure today, Deike enjoyed a considerable reputation during her lifetime as one of Cleveland's leading progressive artists.