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."

"I’m going to the house to make a phone call," Barney said, putting on the tweed cap he had bought for his Connecticut visits. "I’m going to call Tony Smith."

"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."

Let me describe a typical day in the life of Cleve Gray. Let’s say it’s in the late 1970s. Both our sons are safely tucked away at the University of Pennsylvania, and for the first time we are alone for months at a time. We rise shortly before eight, impelled by the needs of the poodle who slept at the foot of our bed. Cleve quickly gets dressed and has his breakfast of toast and Hu-Kwa tea while beginning to read his New York Times. As I come in for my own breakfast routine, he proffers his cheek. "Morning kiss?" he says. I comply. "Be sure to have a decent, nourishing breakfast," he orders, wagging his finger at me as he leaves the room; and after a short session at his desk, he goes to his studio. I do not go into my own work space — Cleve’s "old" studio, which I joyously inherited when he abandoned it — until 12 or so, when all household chores are behind me. We lunch separately and do not really see each other until dinnertime, which we take on trays on our laps, watching the evening news. We quietly discuss the day’s work. "I think I did a good picture," he says occasionally, or else, every few months, "I’m having the worst trouble with a painting. I’d like you to come and look at it tomorrow." Unless there’s a family crisis, I never enter his studio without this kind of specific invitation. When I come in to comment on a troublesome painting, he turns down his music and listens to me attentively, then gives me a kiss and a "Thank you, honey" before I leave.

Ours was a tranquil, workaholic life. If we could afford it, we traveled yearly. In the 1970s, a journey up the Nile with our kids and our close friend Dick Avedon, whom we met as we lay side by side on the floor of the US Senate protesting the Vietnam War, was our most memorable trip. In 1987, when Cleve had open-heart surgery and his entire pace began to slow, crossing the Atlantic became too stressful. He had a passion for the ocean, and we experimented with various Caribbean islands — settling in the last few years on Anguilla, where Cleve enjoyed the finest swimming he’d ever had.

It was in Anguilla, however, in 2002, that a truly severe degeneration of Cleve’s eye-sight began. Upon coming home, we were told that he had suffered a stroke of the optic nerve that deprived him of all peripheral vision and greatly altered his sense of balance. He couldn’t fly anymore, nor could he tackle the surf, and he could only go into his beloved ocean — we were now limited to taking a train to some Florida destination — if helped by a lifeguard, which he found humiliating. His universe was closing in. He could read books only with the greatest difficulty, which depressed him to no end.

And yet, and yet: what is amazing is that this decade of limited vision, the decade in which he became most obsessively addicted to his studio, brought forth some of his most powerful, original paintings. The works of Cleve’s last four years in particular, executed with oil sticks (which he’d turned to because he found them easier on his arthritic hand than brushes) were the best of his career; and the little joy he experienced in those last years is that he knew they were his best, and that they were being snapped up by a whole new generation of young collectors. "Being half blind, you only see the essentials," he’d explain, "and that’s all that matters." Otherwise, he grew increas-ingly haunted by his dread of total blindness, and by the death of his closest friends. Barney had gone long ago, in the late ’60s. In 2004 came the death of Dick Avedon. Dick had been on assignment for The New Yorker in San Antonio, Texas. Showering to prepare for a noon photo shoot, he slipped and fell, hitting his head on the rim of the tub. He had been taking large doses of Coumadin, as Cleve had, as a cure for arterial fibrillations. After a few recurring moments of consciousness, he fell into a coma, and died four days later.

Our great mutual friend Adam Gopnik broke the news to us by phone. Cleve came into my room, tears in his eyes, and said, "I want to die just like Dick, on my way to work, on my way to the studio."

Two months later, on the morning of December 7, 2004, Cleve, coming out of the house on his way to his beloved studio, slipped and fell on the year’s first ice, and knocked his head badly on the ground. I was in New York, and he did not make a big deal of it when I made my habitual lunchtime call. "I’ve just taken some Tylenol. I’ll stay in the house this afternoon and skip the studio," he said resignedly.

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.