Cleve Gray

Cleve Gray, achieved his greatest critical recognition in the late 1960's and 70's after working for many years in a comparatively conservative late-Cubist style. Inspired in the 60's by artists like Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, Mr. Gray began to produce large paintings using a variety of application methods - pouring, staining, sponging and other nontraditional techniques - to create compositions combining expanses of pure color and spontaneous calligraphic gestures. Cleve Ginsberg was born in New York on Sept. 22, 1918. (The family changed its named to Gray in 1936.) He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, and completed his college preparatory studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he won the Samuel F. B. Morse Prize for most promising art student. In 1940 he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with a degree in art and archaeology. He wrote his thesis on Chinese landscape painting. Chinese painting would later become an important influence on his own painting. Mr. Gray joined the Army in 1942 and served in Britain, France and Germany, where he sketched wartime destruction. After the liberation of Paris he began informal studies with the French artists Andréé Lhote and Jacques Villon, and he continued those studies after the war. He began to exhibit his work at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, and he had his first solo exhibition at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in 1947, a year after returning to the United States. 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 other museums. His most recent exhibition of new paintings was in 2002 at Berry-Hill Galleries in Manhattan. 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).