Cleve Gray, Lyrical Abstract Expressionist Lithograph Cleve Gray Lithograph Silkscreen Print, 1976

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Description

Cleve Gray, American (1918-2004)
Composition, (1976)
serigraph or lithograph
Hand signed lower right, and editioned 36/60
Dimensions: 19.25 X 23.75 … Read more Cleve Gray, American (1918-2004)
Composition, (1976)
serigraph or lithograph
Hand signed lower right, and editioned 36/60
Dimensions: 19.25 X 23.75 inches sheet.
unframed

Cleve Gray (1918 – 2004) was an American Abstract expressionist painter, who was also associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.
Gray was born Cleve Ginsberg, the family changed their name to Gray in 1936. 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. Best known for his calligraphic abstractions which melded elements of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and traditional Chinese scroll painting. After graduation in 1941 Gray moved to Tucson, Arizona. In Arizona he exhibited his modernist 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. Gray returned to the United States in 1946. In 1949 he moved to the house his parents had owned on a 94-acre property in Warren, Connecticut, and lived there for the rest of his life. In the 1960s he formed a close friendship with Barnett Newman. It was during this time that he experienced an artistic metamorphosis, dissolving his earlier cubist compositions in a sea of distilled color. This dramatic body of work marked the beginning of an artistic meditation that would last for over 40 years. The rigors of French modernism, the ethos of Abstract Expressionism and the meditative restraint of Chinese and Japanese scroll painting commingle with astounding affect. The atmospheric, subdued tones of his 1960s paintings gradually gave way to bright, monochromatic fields of color, hazily washed onto the canvas in stain like swathes. Much of his work from the last three decades of his career feature striking graphic brushwork that conjures the influence of Asian, Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. 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. 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. 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.

Museum collections

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida
The Brooklyn Museum, New York City
Columbia University Art Gallery, New York City
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, New York City
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii
The Jewish Museum, New York City
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
The Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
The Newark Museum, New Jersey
Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Oklahoma City Art Center, Oklahoma
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.[14]
The Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey[6]
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

He was included in the show 1977, Group Exhibition, Betty Parsons Gallery. Mino Argento, Calvert Coggeshall, Minoru Kawabata, Richard Tuttle, Ruth Vollmer, Robert Yasuda, Helene Aylon and Cleve Gray (among others).
1978, Group Exhibition, Betty Parsons Gallery. Ruth Vollmer, Mino Argento, Cleve Gray, Calvert Coggeshall Abstraction: 1950-1970 at Taylor Graham, Greenwich CT. A survey of post-war abstract art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Hard Edge, Minimalism and Op-Art. Adolph Gottlieb, André Cottavoz, Carl Robert Holty, Cleve Grey, Friedel Dzubas, Ilya Bolotowsky, James Hiroshi Suzuki, Norman Bluhm, Ralph Della-Volpe, Theodore Appleby and more. See less