Understanding Modern Art: The Boundless Spirit of Clay Edgar Spohn

“This eminently readable, vivid account of the American artist, Clay Edgar Spohn (1898-1977) provides numerous revelations about modern art, isms, and art institutions.... By 1948 Abstract Expressionism became a recognized "School" and Marcel Duchamp's anti-art was being transcended by Spohn's Assemblage-art, and ‘Discovered Objects.’... This portrait mirrors again the fate of artists who "follow their own direction" without compromise to the establishment of the day or the market, and present a challenge to contemporary society,” Maria Maryniak. “... Spohn’s, The Ballet of the Elements (front cover). San Francisco art critic Tom Albright described this painting exhibited with the best works of West Coast painters, “...with its stripe-like allusions to landscape under a ‘sky’ of fluid, shorthand squiggles, is altogether unique in this context (i.e. the projection still of the fervor, the desperation, the iconoclasm and ethical commitment etc. that went into them) and perhaps for that reason stands out as the exhibition’s most monumental single masterpiece."