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Birdcages acrylic 1960s Cleveland School
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William C. GrauerWILLIAM C GRAUER Cloaked Woman, child
Birdcages acrylic 1960s Cleveland SchoolCirca 1960s
Circa 1960s
$7,000
£5,330.35
€6,137.76
CA$9,919.62
A$10,669.97
CHF 5,702.34
MX$125,768.50
NOK 71,893.15
SEK 65,723.98
DKK 45,859.42
About the Item
William C. Grauer’s acrylic on panel from the 1960s, about 38.5 by 28.5 inches, is one of those paintings that feels familiar and unsettling at the same time. It shows a building façade with a balcony and a doorway, but the surface is so layered and broken up that nothing looks straightforward. Grauer turns a simple architectural view into a dense image about city life, memory, and human presence.
Across the upper part of the painting runs a row of unmistakable bird cages. They are not just decorative patterns. Each cage is carefully drawn with thin vertical and horizontal bars, and in several of them we can see small birds and flashes of yellow or pale color inside. These cages sit in front of a wall made of countless overlapping patches of paint. Cream, gray, brown, green, and blue appear in fractured shapes, more like collage than smooth brushwork. The result is a façade that feels weathered and unstable, as if it has absorbed years of light, posters, stains, and repairs. It looks less like a single moment and more like many moments laid over one another.
At the center, a dark red frame marks a doorway that opens into deep shadow. Within that space stands a woman wrapped in a long cloak or shawl. She appears to be holding a small child in her arms, the two of them turned slightly inward toward the darkness of the interior. A faint greenish glow near their heads and shoulders suggests a lamp or a patch of inner light that touches them while the rest of the doorway remains in shadow. This mother and child become the emotional core of the painting. Everything else is stone, plaster, cages, and broken light, but here we see a quiet, intimate human moment unfolding at the edge of the street.
Grauer’s use of acrylic is crucial. The paint dries quickly and can be scraped, pressed, or layered, and he uses that to build a rough, almost crusted surface. Up close, the wall breaks down into tiny ridges and shards of color. From across the room, though, the building pulls together again. That shift between abstraction and recognition keeps the eye moving and gives the painting its energy. We see both the real subject, a balcony house with bird cages and a doorway sheltering a woman and child, and a field of abstract marks that belong to mid‑century painting.
Light in the work is uncertain. There is no single clear source, only patches that seem to flare up or sink into shadow. The upper wall around the cages is mottled and smoky, while the lower area around the doorway is darker and heavier. The green patch near the figures reads almost like an inner lamp or a shaft of light from another room. This uneven light adds to the sense that we are looking at memory rather than a literal snapshot.
The presence of cages filled with birds brings the idea of confinement to the surface. These are living creatures kept behind bars, hanging above the street. Below them stands the woman with her child, sheltered by the doorway but also boxed in by it. The building begins to feel like a symbol of social structures that protect and restrict at the same time. Yet the painting is not entirely bleak. The birds add delicate points of life to the upper register, and the woman continues to cradle her child within this environment. The complex surface suggests richness as much as hardship.
Grauer’s painting sits between old and new. Streets, balconies, doorways, caged birds, and a mother holding a child all belong to a long visual tradition, yet his fractured surface and modern palette belong firmly to the 1960s. The work does not simply tell a story. Instead it evokes a state of mind: the sense of walking through an old quarter of a city where birds sing in cages above and where walls carry the traces of many lives. That blend of recognizable detail and layered abstraction is what gives this painting its lasting power.
Signed lower right.
Framed Dimensions: 46 x 36 inches
PROVENANCE: The Artist, Cleveland, Ohio;
Acquired from the above over a 50 year period by a relative of the artist, Rancho Santa Fe, California.
- Creator:William C. Grauer (1896, American)
- Creation Year:Circa 1960s
- Dimensions:Height: 38.5 in (97.79 cm)Width: 28.5 in (72.39 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement Style:
- Period:
- Condition:In very fine, age appropriate condition.
- Gallery Location:Rancho Santa Fe, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU516317219532
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