Career
Clews then joined the family financial firm under the tutelage of his father, but that business held no long-term future for his artistic sensibilities.
Clews decided to become an artist and studied sculpture under Auguste Rodin. His preferred mediums were oil paint and sculpture with smaller sculptural pieces were often rendered in limestone or porphyry while the larger sculptural pieces were commonly rendered in bronze or marble. His early art in America was not exhibited widely. There are records of at least two exhibitions in New York during 1909, both at the Fifth Avenue gallery of M. Knoedler & Company. The first exhibition was in March for two portraits and the second in November was for ten sculptures. His later art was exhibited primarily in France.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also has some records of an exhibition from May to August in 1939 after his death. The Louvre museum in Paris records a number of Clews' works in the La Fayette database of American art in France. Clews' best-recognized work is the bronze and marble sculpture entitled "God of Humormystics", the original of which is on display in the garden at Chateau de la Napoule. The American Art News of 12 February 1916 refers to this sculpture being on display in the galleries of Jacques Seligman & Co. at 750 Fifth Avenue in New York City. There is an unconfirmed report of a copy of the "God of Humormystics" being on public display somewhere in the State of Virginia, so if the report is true, the copy is likely the same one that was on display in New York in 1916. The sculpture itself was described by a critic and reviewer in 1916 as
A strange artistic production, full of odd imagery.... From a basic column of colored marble, about whose base disport three bronze amorini, one with wings and drunk, and another uplifting a wreath, rises an emaciated and strongly modelled bronze figure of an aged man, crowned with a bird's nest at whose edge two doves bill and coo. He stands on a base, bearing a woman's head and hand and a colossal frog. He holds in one hand a rose and in the other nothing. About the round base circle 18 heads, including those of the Saviour and the Virgin, and others, crowned and uncrowned, but nearly all grotesquely ugly. Inspired by the early art of the Chinese the work is a bitter satire on life, sardonic and rather horrible, if somewhat fascinating.
Another sculpture of a solitary male figure entitled "The Thinker" has been on public display in the Brookgreen Gardens in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for nearly 80 years. Brookgreen also holds and displays several other smaller works by Clews, consistent with its mission "To collect, conserve and exhibit figurative sculpture by American artists."
Clews' art has been referenced by contemporary artists, including John Olsen in photography and Sigmund Abeles in sculpture. Abeles credits the Brookgreen Gardens display of Clews' work as being a seminal influence on choosing art and sculpture as his own life's work. A joint exhibition of both Abeles' and Clews' art entitled "Creative Encounters" ran from July to October 2012 at the Wentworth-Coolidge Commission in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
