Cleve Gray

Cleve Gray is an American painter whose work combines different abstract movements. Primarily he is an Abstract Expressionist painter with properties of Color Field Painting and as well as Lyrical Abstraction. Gray was born in 1936 in New York and attended Ethical Culture School in New York City and Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, both where he had formal art training. He went on to graduate from Princeton University with a degree in both art and archaeology. Gray did not begin his journey with his abstract pieces as he started out depicting representational subjects such as portraits and landscapes. However after enlisting in the army and serving during World War II, his work started to verge more and more abstract over the years. This also came from the informal training of Jacques Villon and Picasso, which undoubtedly influenced his work. By the 1960’s Gray had gone beyond Cubism and focused his work more upon brush strokes, strong color choices and gestural compositions. Gray died in December of 2004, aged 86 years, in Warren CT after slipping on ice outside his home.

Gray’s works remain displayed in public collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum; Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Princeton University Art Museum.