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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"There," he added with an oracular gesture, pointing at a spacious hay barn a few dozen yards across the driveway, "is where your new studio will be."

Cleve had total trust in Barney, so that was that. The architect and sculptor Tony Smith, a tall, bearded, formidably erudite man with close-cropped gray hair and bemused, bespec-tacled blue eyes, came to us every few weeks to spend the night and evolve his project. We were thrilled to discover that this Jack of all arts and pioneer of Minimalism knew all of Finnegan’s Wake by heart and was delighted, especially when offered plenteous libations, to quote it by the yard over the dinner table. Tony’s remodeling project took only some six months. We inaugurated the new 2,000-square-foot studio in February of 1963 with a large, unleashed party at which one of Cleve’s oldest friends, Joe Kelleher, director of the Princeton University Art Museum, lost his false teeth in the snow. And very soon after Cleve had moved in, we learned how accurate Barney’s instinct had been: throughout the following decades, increasingly large canvases sprang to life in Cleve’s new space. More important, all traces of Villonesque proto-Cubist influence vanished from his work; they were replaced by a color-based gestural expressionism, often infused with Far Eastern calligraphic motifs, which in the words of the art critic Karen Wilkin was "entirely his own."

There was Oklahoma, which would be bought by the New School ("Attaboy, attaboy," Barney said as he looked at the 30-foot-wide canvas). There was the luminous "Ceres" series, inspired by Cleve’s two trips to Greece in the early 1960s; their seven-by-seven-foot scale was more modest, but they foretold the vertical, "earth goddess" motif — the artist’s own words — that dominated the most monumental and extraordinary work of his career, Threnody. This project was assigned him by the Neuberger Museum at the State University of New York at Purchase. It consisted of a suite of 14 paintings, each 20 feet square, that now cover the walls in the museum’s largest room, and is dedicated to the memory of those who had died on both sides of the Vietnam War. The installation was hailed by Thomas Hess, founder and publisher of Art News, as "one of the most ambitious and successful [painting ventures] of the mid-century" and by Emily Genauer of the New York Post as exceeding Houston’s Rothko Chapel "in its imagination, power, and technical brilliance."

Cleve Gray was born in New York City in 1918. After graduating from Phillips Andover Academy (where he suffered from being the only Jew in his class) and from Princeton, he served in the Army for four years. Upon arriving in Paris, two weeks after the city’s liberation, he went knocking at the doors of Picasso and of Gertrude Stein — he was the first GI either of those luminaries saw. In 1948, after the death of his beloved sister, which he referred to as his life’s "most traumatic event," he settled with his parents into the spacious domain in Warren, Connecticut, an 18th-century house of gray field stone, surrounded by a half dozen barns, which I still occupy to this day.

Cleve’s sense of vocation came at an eerily early age. When he was four years old, as he was walking with his mother down a New York street, he suddenly stood transfixed before a shopwindow that displayed an array of brilliant-hued paint tubes and begged his mother to buy some. She readily obliged her darling. When little Cleve came home, he took down his pants and smeared the paints all over his belly, all down his legs, remembering this sensation for the rest of his life as the most voluptuous he’d ever had. Then he reached for a piece of paper and smeared the paint on that, and that feeling was equally delectable. It is to this moment that Cleve traced his desire to be a painter.

For the following 82 years, he never once diverged from this work. His infatuation with the sensuality of paint, his parasexual attraction to the medium’s physicality, never left him and became all the more obsessive when he moved to his new work space. "He was more sensually drawn to his studio than any other painter I’ve ever met," says his biographer, Nicolas Fox Weber. "From the minute he walked into it, you could feel his batteries recharging. He used to say, ‘I have everything I want in life — Francine, two marvelous kids, and this studio.’" Cleve’s archivist, art historian George Lechner, remembers that Cleve "went into his studio every day, seven days a week, the way a hyperobsessed doctor or lawyer might go to his office." And indeed, whenever I visited his studio, I would often see Cleve sitting in a chair, listening to the music he constantly played (in his last years, Bartók and Shostakovich quartets were his favorites), staring at his painting wall, sometimes anguished, but always patient. He was "just waiting," as he would put it, "for the juices to flow."