About Walt Clemens

The Clemens family valued art and enrolled Walt at age seven in Saturday classes at the Cincinnati Art Museum.  Walt’s great grandfather cared for the silver at the Kaiser’s Sansouci palace near Berlin. His son Gustav moved to the United States and became a lithographer and music teacher in Cincinnati. Gustav’s daughter, Walt’s aunt Gertrude, studied painting with Frank Duveneck at the Cincinnati Art Academy. She and her husband later designed greeting cards for the Gibson company.

Though Walt played football on a state champion team and debated, he majored in art at Purcell High School and edited the school yearbook, which won a national award. His pastels and posters won prizes in city-wide competitions in Cincinnati.

In college Clemens took classes at the Cincinnati Art Museum and studied for a year at the Fine Arts Academy of Vienna–his eyes opening wide as he experienced the great museums, churches, and concert halls of Europe. In Vienna, then under four-power occupation, Clemens began to study and write about East-West relations as well as art. Having done research for one year in Moscow and backed with degrees from Notre Dame and Columbia University, Clemens in the 1960s became a professor at the University of California, MIT, and then Boston University. He is now Associate, Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Reflecting Walt’s travels and lectures in forty countries across six continents, his drawings fill many sketch books. Over the years he also studied painting and sculpture at the Boston University School of Fine Arts, UCLA, Santa Monica City College, the Smithsonian Institution, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, De Cordova Museum, and Danforth Museum. Following a Fulbright year in Trinidad, Clemens taught finger painting to children there under a grant from UNESCO.  His class “Great Myths of Four Civilizations” at Boston University required students to paint and dance as well as discuss Tristan and Isolde, Ramayana, and other epics. Clemens’s many books include multiple collaborations with syndicated political cartoonists Jeff Danziger and Jim Morin, winner of a Pulitzer prize.

Walt Clemens can be reached though this contact form. Prints of his works are available as well as original paintings and drawings. Terms available on request.