oil on board

33.5”L x 40.75”W

1930’s

Marcelline Spencer was born in Akron, Ohio in 1910, and married artist and art professor Edmund Brucker in 1939. They lived in Ohio for approximately 15 years, where Edmund graduated from the Cleveland School of Art. They were participating artists in the May Show at The Cleveland Museum of Art, and moved to Indiana where Edmund taught at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Marcelline’s painting, Cleveland Flats, which dates to approximately 1930, has been widely exhibited, along with numerous watercolor paintings and etchings.

She and her husband are known as the artists of American Scene Painters or American Regionalism, and their work sought to earnestly express the American experience in all its complexity and plurality, primarily dating to the early to mid twentieth century.

Between the twentieth-century's two world wars, American artists across the country began to look to their neighbors and to their immediate surroundings for inspiration. These painters produced cogent snapshots of American values, desires, challenges, and aspirations that resonated nationwide. 

Marcelline Brucker-Spencer’s Cleveland Flats departs from the Impressionist style many artists were working in during this time period. Its jagged shapes, flattened planes and raw paint handling portrays a scene of ore piles, rail cars and smoky skies with an Expressionist edge, connecting with Cleveland’s industrial past.