The name of the injury suffered by both Dick Avedon and Cleve is "subdural hematoma," a mass of blood that accumulates beneath the skull as a result of serious impact, and it can soon cause brain death. There’s a medical term called "the lucid interval" that denotes the stretch of four to six hours between the injury and the patient’s lapse into coma. When I phoned home again at 3 pm, our neighbor answered. She had just been alerted by our housekeeper, who found Cleve slumped at his desk. They had just called 911. He had entered a deep coma, as Dick had, and he died the following day.

I return to my husband’s studio. Hanging just to the left of its door are musings by the 19th-century Japanese painter Hokusai that sum up the longings of its late occupant:

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six: I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was 50, but really nothing I did before the age of 70 was of any value at all. At 73, I have at last caught every aspect of nature — birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am 80, I shall have developed still further, and I will really master the secrets of art at 90. When I reach 100, my work will be truly sublime, and my final work will be attained around the age of 110, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life.

"Interplay," a selection of Cleve Gray’s works on paper, is on view at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, through May 10, and the retrospective "Cleve Gray: Man and Nature" is on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, from Mar. 17 through May 31. Gray is represented by Morrison Gallery, Kent, Connecticut, and Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, New York.

"Shades of Gray" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.