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After graduating from Princeton in 1940, Cleve Gray went off to
fight in WWII and ended his tour of duty in Paris, After his discharge,
he returned to Paris, where he studied with Andre L'Hote and became
close to another mentor, cubist Jacques Villon. Returning to New
York, he soon began to exhibit his cubist-inspired paintings and
was successful. Gray's painting style changed as the abstract-expressionist
movement gathered strength, and he became more interested in Chinese
masters and spontaneous expression. He continues to exhibit regularly
through the present time, enjoying a successful, respected status
in the art world. His work is in major collections worldwide and
has been featured in many one-person exhibitions and both museums
and commercial galleries.
By the seventies, Gray's work had left most of its cubist-inspired
underpinnings behind and had evolved to incorporate risk and accidental
effects as well as thinly-spread layers of pigment. In Perne, for
example, a small explosion of painterly incident at the right of
the canvas takes place over layers of orange hues. The inspirations
for these abstract works range from Greek sculpture to Hawaiian
waterfalls. Their relationship to oriental calligraphy is also apparent.
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Thomas Hess, Cleve Gray, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1977
"Gray's recent and, to many who have followed his work with
interest over the past decades, his most successful paintings are
group-titled Conjugations and Conjunctions (note the blunt
citation of dualities and their resolution). They concern large,
mild, almost blank fields, with some mild static at the framing
edges. Within the field, usually towards the lower section, is a
lump or blob of emphatically calligraphic swirl. It's a distinctly
abstract shape. Gray carefully eliminates any visual puns or slips
into animal or vegetable associations. The fields are keyed to strange,
in between hues: a violet that inhabits a space in between greens,
for example, or a black that hangs out with scarlet. Below, the
calligraphies hunker into themselves as active interlaces. Gray
arrived at this latest development through a logical if astonishing
evolution. First came a long series of upright shapes, some of them
based on glimpses of waterfalls in Hawaiian forests (in 1970), others
on meditations about classical Greek sculptures (first seen on an
Aegean voyage in 1964), especially a goddess image. The upright
shape was perfected, with bends of thigh and swerve of torso, until
Gray brought it to stunning monumentality in Threnody, 1973,
a suite of murals for a giant space in the museum (by Philip Johnson)
of the State University of New York at Purchase.
...The given, the hypothesis, is a field of pure if ruffled color.
Gray works on it for days, applying all the cunning and sensitivity
to the medium that he's learned in a lifetime of work. After the
field is prepared, the calligraphic element is added, sometimes
within the framing space that marks the edges, sometimes on top
of an island of color established towards the bottom of the sector--a
sort of field within the field. Up until this stage, the work has
progressed thoughtfully, systematically, with both eyes kept wide
open for planned effects and happy accidents, and with the hand
and wrist in tight control of the flowing pigments.
Then Gray loads a brush with a predetermined hue. He takes off his
shoes and steps into the middle of the picture. He closes his eyes,
stoops over, and commences the gestural drawing. And he screams.
A wild, crazy howl--like a Zen swordsman or Wu initiate--Ch'iang!
Darkness by day! The east wind blows gust on gust, spreading magic
rain--chanted by the ancient shamans. Gray pulls the drawing, the
paint, eyes still shut, along a path he had prepared only in the
most general terms, in his head. He calls the procedure, with a
grin, 'my screaming act', and he is a bit embarrassed when he describes
it."
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