Cleve Gray | |
---|---|
Born |
Cleve Ginsberg September 22, 1918 New York City |
Died | December 8, 2004 Hartford, Connecticut |
(aged 86)
Nationality | American |
Known for | Abstract expressionist |
Cleve Gray (September 22, 1918 in New York City – December 8, 2004 in Hartford, Connecticut) was as an American Abstract expressionist painter, who was also associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.
He was born Cleve Ginsberg. The family changed their name to Gray in 1936.
He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York City (1924–1932); and from age 11 to age 14 he began his formal art training with Antonia Nell, (who had been a student of George Bellows). At 15 until the age of 18 he attended the Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts; where he studied painting with Bartlett Hayes and won the Samuel F. B. Morse Prize for most promising art student. In 1940 he graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude, with a degree in Art and Archeology. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. At Princeton he studied painting with James C. Davis and Far Eastern Art with George Rowley, for whom he wrote his thesis on Yuan dynasty landscape painting. Gray retained a lifelong passion for Asian art after focusing on it at Princeton.
After graduation in 1941 he moved to Tucson, Arizona. In Arizona he exhibited his landscape paintings and still lifes at the Alfred Messer Studio Gallery in Tucson.