Shades of Gray

Photo by Ugo Mulas, courtesy Francine du Plessix Gray

Cleve Gray and Francine du Plessix Gray, 1962

Pablo Picasso Henri Matisse Andre Lhote Tony Smith Richard Avedon Jean Bazaine Caravaggio Cleve Gray

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Among the objects hanging in Cleve Gray’s studio in Warren, Connecticut, a shamanistic 2,000-square-foot space that I’ve left untouched since his death four years ago, are, clockwise from the studio’s door: looking north, a reproduction of Matisse’s 1910 La fenêtre ouverte; a large New Guinea warrior’s shield flanked by a photograph of a seventh-century bronze statue of Buddha; postcards of a Hokusai waterfall, of Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time, of a 12th-century nave in the cathedral of Poitiers.

The eastern side of his studio is his painting wall, so we veer right and south: four photographs of his mentor, the French painter Jacques Villon, one of which shows Villon holding our six-month-old son Thaddeus on his lap; another tall totemic sculpture from the Papuan Gulf; by a large worktable — littered, as are the window ledges, with a pandemonium of brushes, chisels, hammers, notebooks, sponges, crayons, tubes of paint — a poster of Caravaggio’s Narcissus.

Western wall: yet more Papuan figures, one of them a threatening, eight-foot-wide, savagely toothed alligator; coming back full circle and north, left of the studio’s door, a photograph of Australian Aborigines sitting on brilliant-hued rugs as they hold a religious service; two watercolors of a beach in Hawaii, painted by our son Luke when he was nine years old; photos of Cleve’s sister and of me; large reproductions of the Pietà d’Avignon, and of a blue-and-white cutout from Matisse’s chapel in Vence.

How vividly can such images and mementos reveal an artist’s nature! My husband, Cleve Gray, was a warm, reclusive, complex, very learned man whose life was exclusively focused on his work and his family. Although adamantly agnostic, he was often deeply moved by religious rituals and could come close to tears during a beautiful church service. He retained a lifelong passion for Asian art, which had been his major at Princeton, whence he graduated summa cum laude with a thesis on Yuan Dynasty landscape painting. Ultraliberal in his politics, he was fairly traditionalist in his social and artistic tastes: in his twenties and thirties, he had remained mired in the aesthetics of the School of Paris, where he’d studied and painted during World War II as a young GI. Keenly aware of what he called his "overly rationalistic" French heritage, in his forties he came to wrestle mightily against it. The savage tribal objects with which he surrounded himself may have been part of that struggle against his initial Cartesianism, as was the "wild, crazy howl ... like that of a Zen swordsman," so the art critic Thomas Hess described it, which Cleve often emitted when attacking a new canvas.

A loner by nature, Cleve remained aloof throughout the 1950s from the social histrionics of the New York School of painters. Yet in the early 1960s, he formed a deep friendship with his colleague Barnett Newman; and it’s thanks to "Barney" that the studio in which Cleve shed his Frenchness, found his own unique style, and spent his last 42 years, came to be.

I remember the precise moment. It was 1962. Barney, Cleve, and I were standing in what I’ll call Cleve’s "old studio," in which he had worked for the 14 years since moving to Connecticut. It was a modest site compared with most contemporary artists’ spaces, some 600 square feet, with a very large, high, single-plate window that faced north toward a meadow framed by groves of beech and oak trees. Cleve had just finished the largest canvas he’d ever tackled, a painting of the mosque in Cordova, Spain, which took up nearly his entire painting wall. I’d always been struck by how critically Barney had perused Cleve’s studio space whenever he’d visited it; that day, he could not repress himself.

"Listen, friend," he said (a typical beginning for Barney’s dialogues). "Listen, this is a rotten place to work in." Cleve looked stricken. The French artists he’d visited or studied with during his GI days — Villon, Lhôte, Bazaine — worked in relatively modest spaces and ardently believed that a large northern exposure was the sine qua non of a painter’s creativity. "But look, Barney — north!" Cleve said, pointing to his window, brightly splattered with 13 years of brush drippings. "Naaaah," Barney said dismissively, "get rid of all those schmaltzy French ideas! Who cares about north? Moreover, here you’re looking out on na-tu-re!" That last word, spoken in the finely modulated voice of the former high school Latin teacher, was enunciated in a distinctly derogatory tone. "Na-tu-re," he repeated, as if he were speaking the word Gomorrah, "is any artist’s worst enemy ... you’ve got big, big paintings inside of you, and they’ll never break out if you remain in this ..." he searched for the proper word, "... in this poky French place."