As she continued to work in New York and, after 1964, in Chicago, her paintings eventually incorporated figurative art again, sometimes combining the two.
In the 1970s, she became an activist in the art world as a founding member of the Five, a group of abstract artists who collaborated to mount a huge exhibition of their work in the lobby of a Chicago building, and was also an active member of the Artemisia Gallery. It became. , a feminist cooperative there.
By that time, she had begun teaching at the University of Chicago, where she remained a respected faculty member until 1995.
“Vera taught me that a painter needs to balance technique and ideas. Too much technique makes the painting boring, and too much conceptuality makes the painting boring,” says the ex. student Joan Berens wrote in an email. “Although her own ideas come from high European culture, Bella was never a snob and encouraged her students to express ideas drawn from within her own life.”
Ms. Clement received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981.
In addition to her son, she leaves behind her life partner, Peter Baker, a retired pediatrician. Her marriages to violinist and conductor Werner Turkanowski and composer and conductor Ralph Shapey ended in her divorce.
In 2019, Clement completed Carpeted, an abstract expressionist painting depicting a flying carpet. When that was over, she retired.
“She started slowing down and drawing less and less,” her son Shapey said. “She didn’t run out of ideas. But when she saw it, she said, ‘She said everything she wanted to say.'”