CLEVE GRAY by Thomas B. Hess

A scream. A wild scream. This is how the painting is finished.

It begins in silence. A slow consideration of white. In the studio.

Cleve Gray’s studio is in a spacious barn in Warren, Connecticut, he had the building remodeled in 1963 by architect-sculptor Tony Smith (at the urging of their mutual friend Barnett Newman). Tony Smith has a genius for establishing light-soaked volumes, and Gray is at his happiest in his work space, surrounded by various works-in-progress, by stacks of older paintings, shelves of neatly ordered colors, cairns of tools. He keeps some of his earliest paintings handy. There’s a provincial-Cubist landscape he did when he was a Princeton undergraduate (he was in the class of 1940 Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude), and another with a vertical “Chinese” sense of space (George Rowley, who taught Oriental art and philosophy at Princeton had a profound effect on the young artist; Gray’s senior thesis was on Yuan Dynasty landscapes).

Gray is in the happy-unhappy position of owning the most extensive collection of his own paintings. He never had the heady problem of a sell-out success. On the other hand, he’s had the opportunity to live with his developing oeuvre, to consult it from time to time, like a map, to discover, not where he’s going, which no one ever can know, but where he’s been, which only a happy few can ever locate.

Gray paints on raw cotton duck which he buys in wide bolts. He cuts a piece, roughly eight feet square, sufficient for the image he’s got in mind. Vaguely in mind; very vaguely; perhaps — like a figuration one knows to be there, yet it remains closed off, behind a door, lurking. He staples the cloth to the wide painting wall and rubs down the white surface with a wire brush to get rid of its velvety, water-repellant nap. Then he studies the blank plane. Sometimes for as long as twenty minutes. He remembers that Barnett Newman once told him that American artists don’t “look” at their own work, they don’t take time to examine, think, see. Gray accepted the hint. Studying the white expanse, Gray locates something in it; immanent shapes coalesce to hint at an image. If it’s not too pretentious, a comparison might be made between Michelangelo’s legendary practice of contemplating a block of marble to envision the figure prisoned within it. Or, closer to Gray’s temperament, a Chinese artist’s ritualized hesitancy before staining with ink the precious radiance of silk.

What the artist sees in a blank, smooth, white, unprepared surface is, of course, a mirror to his mind — to what he has been thinking about and preparing for months and years. A slight irregularity of weave or flicker of shadow will release an image that was poised at the verge of definition. Gray doesn’t bring back rough beasts or rare polyhedrons from his explorations of the cotton; indeed, he usually finds something that’s similar to his previous paintings. The unforeseen, as in a Kafka story, is what stands next to the familiar. What matters isn’t a novelty among shapes or a fortunate motif; rather it’s the difficult exercise of entering a certain unworldly state of being, of becoming open to psychic forces that can sustain a steady creative activity.

After the long quiet pause of looking, studying, recognizing, deciding, comes the start of energetic work. Gray covers the whole area with acrylic paint; he uses wide housepainter’s brushes, and picks one color that usually is a clue to the work. Because the nature of the acrylic medium plays so considerable a role in his style, it has to be examined in some detail. Acrylic colors are soluble in water, and they dry to a waterproof, tough surface. They won’t crack when the painting is rolled or stretched; they make the surface almost impregnable to the usual damages. Also, they dry quickly. During the drying process various corrections and erasures can be made. After drying, many other layers of color can be added, and thinned, if necessary, with colorless acrylic medium. Other paints also can be added on top of acrylics. Duco enamels, for example, or conventional oils, both of which Gray uses from time to time.

Gray had become a master of the many tricks and singularities of the comparatively new material. For example, in one recent painting, he floated a dark purple coat over the central part of a gray field, let it dry for a few minutes, and then sponged it off rapidly, leaving a fine craquelure at the edges, where the paint had dried, and not a trace of the tone in the center. Like deftly marshalled spider webs, it is the kind of effect that is discovered by accident and then controlled and finally introduced to the repertory of means.

Often, thinned acrylic paints dry to a slightly different hue than they seem when wet. Only a thorough knowledge of the medium permits the artist to work with the very close values he relishes — off-whites on off-off-whites on near-grays. In this respect, working with thinned acrylics is an intellectual, experimental process, a bit like working with tusche for a color lithograph. The artist knows what color he is going to get; he knows it in his head. But he can’t feel it develop and watch it move in front of him. In other words, the sensuous nature of painting with color is constricted. The artist is kept at a slight remove from his work in progress, from a red turning langorously orange with the addition of yellow, for example. He must calculate the effect he will get by calling to mind previous experiments, old trials and errors.

Gray — who is a skilled print-maker, by the way — takes full advantage of this drawback; in giving up direct, sensuous contact with each layering of color, he opens up all sorts of passages through which can enter the unexpected — the chance event, the accident, the haphazard pleasures of the aleatory. From one point of view, one can consider Gray’s recent paintings as mechanisms perfected for the capture of randomness. In this he relates quite consciously to much of the Oriental painting he always has admired —to Zen exercizes, or to the Chinese master Tao-chi, who wrote:

Sometimes Gray articulates the experience of spontaneity in free, expressionist manipulations of the brush; sometimes in thinned, flat colors poured from a can; he washes them on with a sponge. One understands the signal of an edge that curves so quickly it contradicts any suggestion of premeditation. Areas of liquid break into splashes as if the speedy gestures of spilling somehow had been frozen. Of course there’s artifice as well as vigor to the brio look. Gray can correct each petal of a splash, or wipe out its edges to heighten the effect of “no hands”. He can channel the flow of spilling colors. Usually, however, he lets things come as they will. The ultimate correction in Gray’s painting is the decision to preserve or destroy the work —after long, thoughtful consideration. Until the final judgement is made, he’s apt to be as perhmissive a creator as he is strict in his routines of work.

To recapitulate: The steps in the development of one of Gray’s recent paintings — Arachnid, 1977, for example — run something along these lines:

1. Before the picture is started, sometimes while thinking at night, Gray sets up a challenge — a project — in which certain colors will be confronted. In this case, a red, a violet, and a green.

2. The cotton duck is stapled to the wall, and Gray studies it to find his motif, and to enter a psychic state in which work can be started and sustained.

3. He brushes a field of acrylic Permanent Red Light over the whole surface — it acts both as a size and underpainting.

4. After the red dries (while waiting, Gray works on another painting; he keeps several going at the same time), Gray applies a coat of Dioxamine Violet over the red, leaving an irregular margin of about five inches on all four sides. The paint is kept quite thin. There is lots of brushwork showing. The red under-paint comes through both as a negative or “background” plane and as positive or “foreground” volumes. In other words, background and foreground distinctions tend to cancel each other out for a more unified, wholistic Gestalt.

5. With the picture still on the wall, Gray studies it for the placement of a figuration —where it will be, how its lines will move.

6. The picture is placed on the floor. A calligraphic, heavily drawn island of red is established off-center. It’s kept the same tone of red as the underpaint. Corrections are made, some splashes removed with a sponge, some larger adjustments of shape are added.

7. The painting is replaced on the wall for study; then put on the floor, and a very free, calligraphic element is imposed on the red “island”, more or less in its center. It’s a bright green.

8. After careful restudy, Gray decides that the pale green doesn’t hold the plane; while it’s still wet, a dark green (it almost reads “black”) is added over it in a separate linear tangle, sometimes covering it, sometimes letting the paler tone come through.

9. Final adjustments are made.

No work that’s worth the effort ever is typical, and Arachnid includes some unusual complications in its final stages. Furthermore, in schematizing Gray’s procedure to nine stages, much of its drama is lost or weakened — the tension kept up between small nuances and major contrasts, the feather-fine tuning in shapes that seem to have been lathered on at full tilt. Also, the interior life of a painting can’t be divided into step-by-step procedures; rather, events move in and out of each other in organic, ambiguous shifts. The viewer can’t really tell where one idea ends and the next one begins. Except for the punctuating intermissions, so to speak — the moments when the picture is stapled to the wall, and when it is laid out on the floor, then back to the wall, then back on the floor. There is an interplay between contemplation and action. It’s not as metaphysical as the Aristotelian conflict of stasis with praxis. The artist can only see his painting properly when it’s on the wall. On the floor, where most of the work gets done, there is too much distortion in the perspective for him to be able to gauge how the image is progressing.

In this procedure, he relates, of course, to Jackson Pollock, and to such younger Pollock-inspired artists as Helen Frankenthaler, who also prefers to work on horizontal surfaces. But Gray has other roots, both in contemporary art and in historical sources. In the glowing edges of thin, chalky hues, which pass ineffably from tone to tone, his work reminds you of Mark Rothko’s (which Gray liked). In front of certain burst-like shapes in marinescape light, you think of Adolph Gottlieb — by no means one of Gray’s favorites (an example of how artists are often drawn against their wills and conscious efforts into the same ambience of style they consider unsympathetic). Also important is the example of John Marin, whom Gray reveres and about whom he has published an extensive scholarly anthology. Indeed, in a sense, Gray’s recent paintings can be considered vast watercolors —he spreads and thins pigments through the medium of water; he works on pure white, absorbant surfaces; there are related effects of pooling, washing, and drybrushing translucent coats of bright color. And behind Marin, there is Whistler, and beyond both of them the old American longing for the East — for Chinese colors and black ink thrown on ice-white silk in gestures that trap simultaneously a grasshopper and a noun, a reckless swipe and a meditated adjustment.

All paintings are self-portraits. In Cleve Gray’s work, his fondness for grayed hues and the non-color itself is too evident to require any extended comment. Furthermore, as a tone, gray is the mediating presence, a Spinozan “yes, but” in which black meets white, and vivid color dissonances get a chance for resolution. The artist quite consciously and systematically deals with a dialectic of opposites and with their syntheses; he will count them off in front of a painting in cheery lists: he confronts colors that are transparent with those that are opaque, light with dark, bright with dim, brushstrokes that are highly visible and gestural with areas of paint from which all signs of facture have been eliminated, surfaces that are shiny with surfaces that are mat, shapes that are clearly structured with others that are amorphous and ambiguous, forms that are open and closed, large and small, male and female . . . He seeks a harmony between such countering elements. Just as even the brightest tones can find a unity in grays, Cleve Gray dreams of an epiphany in reconciliations. He has the noble temperament of a peacemaker. As a young man, he excelled at doing what was demanded of him; he left Princeton with the highest honors; after a faltering start he became the prize student in Andre Lhote’s class; his first art-world hero (every important artist is crucially influenced by an art-world hero in the formative years), the classicizing Cubist Jacques Villion, became an intimate friend — indeed there are grounds for believing that the Villons looked on the handsome young American-in-Paris as the shining son of their last years. Certainly he had a parental regard for them — as well as an avuncular one for Villon’s fantastic brother, Marcel Duchamp.

Briefly to recapitulate the chronology published elsewhere in this catalogue, after leaving Princeton in 1940 there was a brief opportunity to paint on his own, Gray enlisted in the army; he had the good luck to end his tour in Paris and make contact with the local art world. He returned to France after his discharge and reenrolled in Lhote’s popular classes. He cultivated his friendship with Villon and older luminaries, and became to all intents and purposes dedicated to the late Cubist experience. By the late 1940s, when Gray was exhibiting regularly in New York (and living in the nearby Connecticut farmland), he was known as an aspiring School of Paris master and as such he was warmly appreciated by critics on The New York Times and officials at the Metropolitan Museum.

It was one of the few moments when luck seemed to be riding with him. In retrospect, it was a mixed blessing. Because at the same time Gray was making a name for himself as an heir to Villon, the emerging Abstract-Expressionist painters (a few of whom later would become good friends with Gray) were “sweating out Cubism” to use Ad Reinhardt’s graphic phrase. And as Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Newman, Kline, Motherwell, Hofmann, and their colleagues began to step forward with increasing confidence and authority, it also became increasingly clear that School of Paris painting, after more than a century of dazzling hegemony, was in decline, and that Cubism and Surrealism had led to an ultimate crisis.

Gray, who was as sensitive and as intelligent as any of his contemporaries, also grasped the crucial nature of the moment. At first he attempted to solve it by making his version of Cubism more "personal” — by getting Villon’s chastely pastoral geometry to vibrate at his own, interior measure. It was a noble effort. It also drained the artist’s energies (it’s hard to pump life into a moribund style). And it hurt his reputation. Then, slowly, astonishingly slowly, picture by picture, he found another way out of the entrapment. He put his trust in the spontaneous— in chance, hazard, the aleatory, the random, the unpremeditated gesture, the coup de des.

Pollock, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, Kline, and others had come to similar conclusions. But instead of following their examples, Gray scrupulously consulted his own sources. There was the example of Marcel Duchamp — whose irony was totally at odds with Gray’s determined sincerity. Of Hans Richter, Gray’s neighbor, an old Dada warhorse, who still rejoiced in the laws of hazard. Of Gray’s father-in-law and friend, Alexander Liberman, who in the mid-1940s had made abstractions founded on invocations of luck. More importantly — because no man wants to be “influenced” — there were Gray’s own earlier sources in Chinese painting, in the thrown colors of the Chinese masters, and in the crystal-clear fluidity of Marin’s watercolors.

The large painting that introduces this exhibition can stand as a Janus-like sentinel in Gray’s oeuvre. It’s titled Homages a Jacques Villon. It’s the only oil painting in the show — all the others are acrylic or mostly acrylic. It was begun in 1963, finished in 1964, and completely repainted in 1966. In its first state it was a semi-abstract landscape in which planes are logically extrapolated to facets indicating motion, and space is controlled through overlaps and a sensitized eye on recessional hues. Two years later, he used the same canvas for an almost completely abstract, gestural structure of amorphous shapes that adhere to each other and to the flat "virtual” space of the picture plane in an overall, post-Cubist system. Only some of the colors, the oranges, perhaps, and their chiming with ochre, recall the gentlemanly elegies of Villon.

How Gray has worked with his developing concept of what the Surrealists used to call “automatic painting” and the Japanese Zen’s, “quickcrazy strokes,” is one of the major themes of this exhibition. Sometimes it dominates, as in Silver Diver, 1967. The picture was started as a semi-Cubist abstraction of spheroid elements (something like a giant Cezanne peach chopped open and stretched upright for a vaguely female presence, in a series named Ceres). The artist became "irritated” at the painting, angry, perhaps because of its intrusive Cubist scaffolding. He picked up a can of silver paint and threw it at the canvas. It made a gorgeous splat. Instead of junking the painting, he studied it, was pleasurably surprised, and made only a few additions. Silver Diver became a starting point for several other images. He purposefully exploited accidental effects in them. He splashed water into the wet metallic paint which left lunar craters and tills as it evaporated. He forced pigments to slither over the canvas with air from a compressor hose. Risk, as in so much of the best American abstract painting, became part of the technique and of the content.

In the paintings that followed (the Hera series), Gray kept a much tighter control over the various elements. And ever since then, the painter has alternated between opening out and tightening up his basic forms — their edges, for example, their surfaces and textures. Sometimes he makes colors swirl with an almost Roccoco delectation that is surprising in this Puritan temperament; sometimes he carefully censors any trace of the pictorial Ego — of what uncle Marcel contemptuously called la peinture peinture.

Gray’s recent and, to many who have followed his work with interest over the past decades, his most successful paintings are group-titled Conjugations and Conjunctions (note the blunt citation of dualities and their resolution). They concern large, mild, almost blank fields, with some mild static at the framing edges. Within the field, usually towards the lower section, is a lump or blob of emphatically calligraphic swirl. It’s a distinctly abstract shape. Gray carefully eliminates any visual puns or slips into animal or vegetable associations. The fields are keyed to strange, in between hues: a violet that inhabits a space in between greens, for example, or a black that hangs out with scarlet. Below, the calligraphies hunker into themselves as active interlaces.

Gray arrived at this latest development through a logical if astonishing evolution. First came a long series of upright shapes, some of them based on glimpses of waterfalls in Hawaiian forests (in 1970), others on meditations about classical Greek sculptures (first seen on an Aegean voyage in 1964), especially a goddess image. The upright shape was perfected, with bends of thigh and swerve of torso, until Gray brought it to stunning monumentality in Threnody, 1973, a suite of murals for a giant space in the museum (by Philip Johnson) of the State University of New York at Purchase. There is no room in this publication for an appropriate discussion of these severe, poignant images with their acres of burning color and glittering black, among which shifting forms — a male-femal imagery — softly are evoked. It must suffice merely to note in passing that the project is one of the most ambitious and successful of the midcentury, and to hope that the paintings will soon be resurrected from the cellars of SUNY where, at this writing, they are stored.

After Threnody came a group of “Triptychs” which schematize the vertical, dancing figuration and, in the central panel, offer a bold, blank, monochrome field. Gray explains that the three-part format always reminded him of the Crucifixion theme, with St. John and Mary flanking the dead Christ. He could cope with the presence of saints. A concept of the Godhead eluded him. Could it have been some remnant of Gray’s Jewish heritage — some inhibition about breaking the Third Commandment, the prohibition of the image of God? Or was it largely pictorial considerations? At any event, the blank, colored space in the center of each Triptych acts as a kind of philosophical mirror. In front of it, the viewer is urged to collect his thoughts about mortality and redemption, to assume the modalities of the spiritual. The void also is an elegantly projected field of intense color, charged with a potentiality of shape. It’s this immanent field, I suggest, this literally God-forsaken space, that was the starting point of the Conjunctions and Conjugation series. Indeed, one of the first of the Conjugations was a 1976 triptych.

The given, the hypothesis, is a field of pure if ruffled color. Gray works on it for days, applying all the cunning and sensitivity to the medium that he’s learned in a lifetime of work. After the field is prepared, the calligraphic element is added, sometimes within the framing space that marks the edges, sometimes on top of an island of color established towards the bottom of the sector — a sort of field within the field. Up until this stage, the work has progressed thoughtfully, systematically, with both eyes kept wide open for planned effects and happy accidents, and with the hand and wrist in tight control of the flowing pigments.

Then Gray loads a brush with a predetermined hue. He takes off his shoes and steps into the middle of the picture. He closes his eyes, stoops over, and commences the gestural drawing. And he screams. A wild, crazy howl — like a Zen swordsman or Wu initiate — “Ch’iang! Darkness by day! The east wind blows gust on gust, spreading magic rain . . .“ chanted by the ancient shamans. Gray pulls the drawing, the paint, eyes still shut, along a path he had prepared only in the most general terms, in his head. He calls the procedure, with a grin, “my screaming act”, and he is a bit embarrassed when he describes it. Is it ostentatious to talk about it? Pretentious? “I haven’t even told Francine,” he adds, referring to his wife, well-known essayist and novelist Francine du Plessix Gray. Yet, after all, he seems pleased with the idea. It’s an efficient way to break the stereotyped habits into which wrists and fingers are apt to fall and stupidly repeat. Many artists have tried a similar tactic (de Kooning, for example, once made a series of drawings with his left hand and his eyes closed or while watching television). Few have applied it to finished paintings of ambitious size and scale. Gray is aware of the risks involved. Still he’s pleased at how he “can get the whole body into a gesture.” When he bends at the center of a painting he can move, like a dancer or a fighter, directly into the target.

It’s an unexpected breakthrough from this highly conscious, formal, self-critical artist — as astonishing as the production of the giant Threnody murals in all their tragic dignity. It is as if a time bomb had been planted in Cubism, from the beginning, and has been ticking away, all these years, and Cleve Gray has been one of the few to wait it out. He’s had the faith and the intelligence to be right there, at the explosion.

-from the catalogue to the exhibition Cleve Gray: Paintings 1966-1977 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., 1977.