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- Steven Slosberg: Midlife mutuations in the life and art of Clem Despard Advertisement
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Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatrical Club in October 1951, with the actor Fred Gwynne, front row center, and his good friend, Clem Despard, directly behind him.| Courtesy of Alice Despard June 25, 2017 12:00AM By Steven Slosberg
Special to The Sun
Oh, to have known Clement Despard, late of Stonington, purveyor of whimsical visuals and social commentary in wall-hanging boxes and nautical “paintings” and a rare soul who experienced several midlife conversions, including religious, from businessman to artist and from Republican to liberal Democrat.
For the record, I did not know him, but own a piece of him — one of those nautical mixed media compositions — a jaunty 2-by-3-foot rendering, in a few elegant lines and cut-out paper sails glued on particle board, of the A. G. Ropes, a three-masted cargo carrier. It was the largest wooden ship afloat when it was launched in 1884, and it was later converted into a schooner barge after being demasted by a typhoon in 1905 near Japan.
Conversions were central to Clem Despard’s being.
Despard, who died in Stonington in 2013 at age 84, has been accorded one posthumous showing of his work: a group exhibition at the La Grua Center in Stonington Borough in 2015, along with the late artists Helen Hooker and Fuller Potter. Shortly before that show, I had chanced upon Despard’s art in his son-in-law’s studio, South Studio Six, in the Velvet Mill in Stonington. I was immediately charmed by the A.G. Ropes and bought it.
The Ropes, though typical of Despard’s multimedia creations, differs from his other paintings of vessels, for which he used sheets of aluminum foil bonded to rayon. The man knew mirth as well as design.
Today, much of Despard’s art — the box constructions and the nautical paintings — grace the walls of the Stonington village home of South Studio Six owner Stuart Chandler and his wife, Alice, on Main Street. In the decades before he died, Despard had exhibitions at the Gallery Henoch in New York, art galleries in Stonington, New Canaan, Conn., and Washington, D.C., and a one-man show at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London.
Curious about him since I purchased his work, I sat down the other day with Alice Despard to talk about her father.
Clem Despard was born in Rumson, N. J. His father’s family’s business was Despard & Co. Inc., marine insurance brokers in New York. He attended the Pomfret School in Connecticut, and then Harvard, where he befriended the actor Fred Gwynne, a fellow member of the Hasty Pudding Club, and the author and bon vivant athlete George Plimpton, when both were on the staff of the Harvard Lampoon. He also was a good friend of John Updike, a few years behind him at Harvard.
He was an officer in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and then pursued a career in business, but his heart was elsewhere. He and his first wife had two daughters, and he eventually married twice more. Alice Despard said it was in the early 1970s, when his mother died and his second wife left him, that Despard, devastated by both events, turned to art as a refuge and relief. “He started painting religious imagery,” she said. “He went through a religious conversion. He also awakened to his real interests.”
By that time he had already turned to social activism, protesting against construction of the World Trade Center, which doomed New York’s Radio Row. Then he and a friend, Thomas B. Mechling, came up with the concept of the “Anti-Corporation.” As a New Yorker story explained in October 1971: “The idea is to set up a for-profit corporation whose revenue would consist chiefly of damages recovered through lawsuits against other corporations. The bases for the lawsuits would be misdeeds of other corporations and also public bodies such as municipalities, particularly in regard to pollution and products that defraud the buyer.”
Despard’s nautical paintings, executed mostly during the 1970s, when he summered in Stonington, were often displayed on the side of a barn behind the Main Street home where his daughter now lives. In the 1980s, he turned to box constructions, many of them employing household items and found objects — decanters, bowling pins, an upended bottle disguised as a balloon — to create fanciful worlds behind glass. But he also created boxes to express outrage. One, hanging upstairs in Alice’s home, depicts Kristallnacht, the wave of anti-Jewish violence in Germany and Austria in 1938. Despard, inside the wooden box, used a broken glass window to frame a scene of village destruction.
He also created a box celebrating the Solidarity labor union founded in Poland in 1980.
He spent the last 15 years of his life year-round in Stonington. Some of his ashes are in a memorial garden at Calvary Episcopal Church in the borough.
Many of the boxes were sold by galleries, but enough are still around the Despard home, as well as an array of the nautical paintings, to furnish a one-man show.
Steven Slosberg lives in Stonington and was a longtime reporter and columnist for The Day in New London. He may be reached at maayan72@aol.com
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1929 - 2013 (84 years)
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