Cleve Gray
Born
Cleve Ginsberg

(1918-09-22)September 22, 1918
New York City, New York
DiedDecember 8, 2004(2004-12-08) (aged 86)
Hartford, Connecticut
NationalityAmerican
Known forAbstract expressionist
Websiteclevegray.com

Cleve Gray (September 22, 1918 – December 8, 2004) was an American Abstract expressionist painter, who was also associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.

Early life and education

Gray was born Cleve Ginsberg: the family changed their name to Gray in 1936.[1] Gray attended the Ethical Culture School in New York City (1924–1932). From the age of 11 until the age of 14 he had his first formal art training with Antonia Nell, who had been a student of George Bellows. From 15 to 18 he attended the Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts; where he studied painting with Bartlett Hayes and won the Samuel F. B. Morse Prize for most promising art student. In 1940 he graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude, with a degree in Art and Archeology. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. At Princeton he studied painting with James C. Davis and Far Eastern Art with George Rowley, under whose supervision he wrote his thesis on Yuan dynasty landscape painting.[2][1][3]

Professional work

After graduation in 1941 Gray moved to Tucson, Arizona. In Arizona he exhibited his landscape paintings and still lifes at the Alfred Messer Studio Gallery in Tucson. In 1942 he returned to New York and joined the United States Army. During World War II, he served in the signal intelligence service in Britain, France and Germany, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. After the liberation of Paris he was the first American GI to greet Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. He began informal art training with the French artists André Lhote and Jacques Villon, continuing his art studies in Paris after the war.[2][1]

Gray returned to the United States in 1946. In 1949 he moved to the house his parents had owned on a 94-acre (380,000 m2) property in Warren, Connecticut, and lived there for the rest of his life. He married the noted author Francine du Plessix on April 23, 1957. They worked in separate studios in two outbuildings with a driveway in between.[1][3]

Gray was a veteran of scores of exhibitions throughout his career, as listed below, from the early days Tucson, through to postwar Paris and New York, and most recently in 2002 at the Berry-Hill Gallery in New York City. His paintings are held in the collections of numerous prominent museums and institutions.[1] In 2009 the art critic Karen Wilkin curated a posthumous retrospective of his work at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, and other posthumous exhibitions have been held.

Death

His wife of 47 years, Francine du Plessix Gray, reported that he died of a "massive subdural hematoma suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head."[1][4][5]

Museum collections

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Publications

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Johnson, Ken (December 10, 2004). "Cleve Gray, 86, a Painter of Large Abstract Works". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 21, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  2. ^ a b "Cleve Gray, an abstract painter, died on December 8th, aged 86". Economist magazine. December 29, 2004. Retrieved November 2, 2008. In both his work and his attitude toward art, he praised sincerity over irony, and considered headline-grabbing, sensationalistic conceptual work destructive. Toward the end of his life, Mr Gray's peripheral vision dimmed, though he continued painting as he always had: in a converted barn at his home in Warren, Connecticut, where he'd lived since 1949. The brushstrokes of "Letting Go", a series of paintings from 2003, may have lacked the boldness and scale of his work from decades past, but the paintings retained Mr Gray's hallmark purity, stark bravery, and genius for color.
  3. ^ a b "Miss du Plessix Engaged to Wed". The New York Times. March 13, 1957. Archived from the original on June 13, 2011. Retrieved October 31, 2008.
  4. ^ "Cleve Gray." Marquis Who's Who TM. Marquis Who's Who, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC Archived January 12, 2001, at the Wayback Machine Document Number: K2015772466. Fee. Accessed 2008-10-31.
  5. ^ Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2008. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC Archived January 12, 2001, at the Wayback Machine Document Number: H1000038983. Entry updated: 20 March 2006. Fee. Accessed 2008-10-31.
  6. ^ a b c d e f "Cleve Gray Online". www.artcyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  7. ^ "Cleve Gray | Albright-Knox". www.albrightknox.org. Archived from the original on July 12, 2020. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  8. ^ "Cleve Gray: Man and Nature - Boca Raton Museum of Art". www.theartwolf.com. May 17, 2009. Archived from the original on September 21, 2013. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  9. ^ "Brooklyn Museum". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Archived from the original on November 28, 2020. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  10. ^ "Bringing Cleve Gray's Threnody to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine - News - Loretta Howard Gallery". www.lorettahoward.com. Archived from the original on September 24, 2020. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  11. ^ "Immense and Glowing Images: Painting by Cleve Gray | Krannert Art Museum". kam.illinois.edu. Archived from the original on May 9, 2022. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  12. ^ Gray, Cleve. "Metropolitan Museum of Art". www.metmuseum.org. Archived from the original on July 16, 2020. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  13. ^ "NBMAA Permanent Collection | Art Museums in Hartford CT". NBMAA. Archived from the original on September 20, 2020. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  14. ^ "Search". www.phillipscollection.org. Archived from the original on September 26, 2023. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  15. ^ "Wadsworth Honoring Cleve Gray With Memorial Exhibition". www.newtownbee.com. Archived from the original on September 26, 2023. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  16. ^ "Cleve Gray". whitney.org. Archived from the original on October 30, 2020. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  17. ^ "Spider | Yale University Art Gallery". artgallery.yale.edu. Archived from the original on September 26, 2023. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  18. ^ "Maratea IV". egallery.williams.edu. Archived from the original on September 26, 2023. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  19. ^ "Etruscan No. 7 | Yale University Art Gallery". artgallery.yale.edu. Archived from the original on September 26, 2023. Retrieved September 17, 2020.

Further reading

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