Cleve Gray Art

Cleve Gray, American (1918-2004) Composition, (1976) serigraph or lithograph Hand signed lower right, and editioned 9/50 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 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...

Cleve Gray (1918–2004), "Suntrack" Acrylic on Canvas - Dated 1987 Frame: 81" x 51", sight: 80" x 50". Radiant and vigorously lyrical, *Suntrack* is a monumental canvas by the Americ...

A very good impression of this large, scarce print, color aquatint on white wove Fabriano paper. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 35. Signed and inscribed "artist's proof" ...

oil on canvas Cleve Gray is a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful, and lyrically gestural abstract compositions. He achieved his greatest critical recognition in ...

Cleve Gray 'End of October,' 1978 Acrylic on canvas 55 x 55 inches Signed verso This work was donated to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) by the The Estate of Cleve Gray for FCA's 2021 benefit exhibition held at Greene Naftali.

A very good impression of this color screenprint on Rives BFK. Signed in pencil, lower right margin. Numbered 68/100 in pencil, lower left margin.

Cleve Gray, American, 1918-2004, untitled, (orange, buff, black with blue edge), lithograph, artist's proof, pencil signed. Dimensions: sheet 30 x 23, framed and plexi glazed 33 x 25.5. Provenance: From the personal collection of Margery Pignatelli and Prince Paolo...

Vibrant, original, signed and dated, 1962, abstract, oil-on-canvas painting by esteemed, award winning American artist, Cleve Gray (1918-2004). Select collections: The Brooklyn Museu...

Southhampton 8:45 PM Signed Gray lower right Titled on verso in black paint Oil on canvas, 28 x 40 inches Exhibited: Jacques Seligman Galleries (label) twice, original price $450. (...

A striking and unique abstraction by abstract expressionist, Cleve Gray. His works on paper translate very well as he carefully chose his papers and combined ab-ex action painting w...

Abstract painting wherein a calligraphic brushstroke delineates a mountaintop.

Waterline Fine Art, Austin, TX is pleased to present the following work: Acrylic on canvas. Signed and dated lower right, titled verso. 69 x 68.25 in. 70.5 x 70 in. (framed) Custom framed in a solid maple floater. Provenance Private Collection, Hilton Head Island, SC Cleve Gray was born Cleve Ginsberg in New York on September 22, 1918. The family subsequently changed its surname to ‘Gray’ in 1936. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, and completed his college preparatory studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, where he won the Morse Prize for most promising art student. In 1940, Gray graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with degrees in art and archaeology. He wrote his thesis on Chinese landscape painting, which would later become an important influence on his own painterly practice. Gray joined the U.S. Army in 1942 and was deployed to the U.K., France, and Germany, where he sketched wartime destruction. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, he began informal studies with the French artists André Lhote and Jacques Villon, which continued following the conclusion of the war. Soon after, he began to exhibit his work at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, followed shortly by his first solo exhibition at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in 1947. Before 1950, Gray would participate in group exhibitions at such venerable institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1960s, he formed a close friendship with the first generation Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman. It was during this time that Gray 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 Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. Beginning with his marriage in 1957 to the French author and New Yorker staff writer, Francine Du Plessix, Gray would spend the remainder of his life working out of his home base in Warren, CT, while continuously exhibiting and participating in residencies around the world. He enjoyed representation and exhibitions with some of the most influential galleries of the day, including the Betty Parsons Gallery, Staempfli Gallery, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Eva Cohon Gallery, and Berry-Hill Gallery. Cleve Gray died in Hartford, CT in 2004, at the age of 86. Gray's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and many other museums and institutional collections around the world. Source: The New York Times and Loretta Howard...