Wadsworth Honoring Cleve Gray With Memorial Exhibition

HARTFORD — The American artist Cleve Gray is being celebrated in a short-term memorial exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. “Cleve Gray: A Memorial Exhibition,” which opened on March 24, is on view only through April 17.

The artist died on December 8, 2004, at the age of 86. A resident of Warren since 1949, Cleve Gray is known for large abstract canvases that are vibrant with a rhythmic sense of color, form, and line.

“I cannot make a painting with no idea, no subject matter; but the inspiration can vary from a Greek tragedy to a still life to Zen thought,” he told his biographer Nicholas Fox Weber. Gray’s sources were many and various — Asian landscape painting and calligraphy, classical music, ancient goddesses, the Connecticut woods, landscapes encountered in his travels, even the terrifying chaos and outrages of war.

Born Cleve Ginsberg in New York City on September 22, 1918, he knew he wanted to be a painter before entering grammar school. According to Mr Gray’s obituary from The New York Times published on December 10, 2004, the family changed its name to Gray in 1936.

At age six Cleve Gray became a student at the Ethical Culture School, where his obvious gift was encouraged, and at age 14 was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he continued to experiment in paint.

Upon graduation from Phillips Academy he was awarded The Samuel F.B. Morse Prize for Most Promising Art Student.

At Princeton University, the artist fell under the influence of Asian art and philosophy and the paintings of Paul Cézanne and John Marin, and was graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Art and Archeology in 1940. He graduated with a degree in art and archaeology and wrote his thesis on Chinese landscape painting. The subject later became an important influence on his work.

As a soldier in World War II, the young artist witnessed the London blitz and its tragic aftermath. Later stationed in liberated Paris, he studied with the painters Jacques Villon and Andre Lhote, with whom he developed a remarkable sense and handling of color. He began to exhibit his work at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris.

Discharged from the Army in 1946, Mr Gray returned to New York and painted his first major series, “London Ruins,” based on drawings done in colored pencil two years earlier. The first of these paintings, “London Ruins #1 (The Spiral Staircase)” is the earliest painting by Gray in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s collection.

Later that same year, he painted the figurative work “The Dance of Death,” informed both by Medieval woodcuts and the savagery of the Holocaust.

Mr Gray’s first solo exhibition was at The Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in 1947, one year after returning to the United States.

In 1949 Mr Gray bought the house in Warren that remained his home for the rest of his life. In 1957 he married Francine du Plessix, who became well known as a novelist and essayist. His first showing at the Wadsworth was three years later, in 1960, when his work was included in the exhibition “Eight From Connecticut.” In 1973 he was part of the museum’s “Nine From Connecticut” exhibition, and in 1976 he joined the museum’s board of trustees. He remained on the board until 1978. His most recent presentation at the museum was in 1995’s “Cleve Gray: Romantic/Modern.”

In 1972 and 1973 Mr Gray produced “Threnody,” a suite of 14 paintings, each measuring 20 by 20 feet, dedicated to the dead on both sides in the Vietnam War. The series was commissioned by the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, and is considered one of the largest groups of abstract paintings created for a specific public space.

“The painting of ‘Threnody’ occupied me for the years 1972-73,” the artist wrote in 1975. “I felt that tragedy has been manifested more intensely during those years and in the preceding decade than at any other time in American history. Iniquity, futile death and destruction surrounded us with little relief.

“This sense of tragedy in the Sixties and Seventies insisted itself upon me as the subject matter for the walls I had been asked to paint in the Neuberger Museum, for I felt that the heroic space encompassed by these walls – roughly 100 feet by 60 feet by 22 feet high – required an heroic subject,” he continued. “The vertical form in each of the 14 panels is a symbol which conforms to by understanding of reality – the inseparability of life from death, the reconciliation of opposites. Yin and Yang.”

On two occasions Mr Gray was commissioned to design religious vestments for Christian church services. The first was in 1972, at the request of Haig Nargesian of The Episcopalian Church in Washington (Conn.), when Mr Gray designed Ordinary vestments to be worn throughout the entire liturgical year.

In 1978, at the request of The Episcopalian Church of Farmington, he designed vestments for the four principal liturgical seasons.

In 1989 Mr Gray was invited to create an installation for The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield. He created “Enter, Entrance, Exit,” one of the works featured in the museum’s “Connecticut Artists” exhibition.

That same year Mr Gray also created “Holocaust Triptych #1” and “Holocaust Triptych #2”; exhibited work at Paris-New York-Kent Gallery in Kent, participated in “Barnard Collects: The Educated Eye” at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York; and was included in “The Connecticut Biennial” at The Bruce Museum in Greenwich.

Mr Gray’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. His most recent exhibition of new paintings was in 2002 at Berry-Hill Galleries in Manhattan. When he died he was working on pictures for a show scheduled for this winter at Berry-Hill.

In addition to painting Mr Gray also wrote frequently about art. He was a contributing editor for Art in America magazine and he edited three volumes of other artists’ writings: David Smith by David Smith (1968), John Marin by John Marin (1970) and Hans Richter by Hans Richter (1971), all published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

He and his wife collaborated on major features for Art in America concerning Thomas Gilcrease and Tulsa for the magazine’s June 1964 issue; Bruce Goff, 1965; and Jackson Pollock, May-June 1967.

The Wadsworth exhibition also includes “Zen Gardens #116” (1987), which presented the artist’s distilled impression of the famous stone and raked gravel garden of Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. In that same year he created a four-panel portrait of the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), which progresses from a monochromatic likeness based on a photograph through increasingly turbulent iterations in veils of color.

The exhibition also features Gray’s “Ansedonia #3” (1960), “The Prophecy” (1965), “Approach” (1968) and “Imaginary Landscape in the Sun” (1994).

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, at 600 Main Street in Hartford, is open Wednesday through Friday, 11 am to 5 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm..

For information about admission fees,  extended hours, the ART shuttle, as well as exhibitions and special programs, visit www.WadsworthAtheneum.org or call 860-278-2670; TDD is 860-278-0294.