November 19, 2020 — January 16, 2021

521 West 26th Street

New York, NY

Loretta Howard Gallery in collaboration with Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art are pleased to announce an exhibition of Cleve Gray: Paintings on Paper from the Foundation. The works are on view at 521 West 26th Street in Chelsea and online from November 19th 2020 to January 16th 2021. They span from the Ceres Series in the 1960s to the Roman Walls of the 1970s and Calligraphic Abstractions of the 1980s. In this exhibition Cleve Gray’s dramatic body of works on paper trace over thirty years of production. These works touch upon the rigors of French modernism, the ethos of Abstract Expressionism and the meditative restraint of Chinese and Japanese scroll painting. 

Cleve Gray (1918- 2004) grew up in New York City. He attended the Ethical Culture School, Phillips Academy Andover and Princeton University. At Princeton, he wrote his senior honor thesis on Yuan dynasty Chinese painting. Gray Served in World War II and remained in Paris after the war where he studied painting with Jacques Villon. After returning to New York he met and married Franccine du Plessix in 1952. The couple were at the center of intellectual life throughout their lives. In the 1960s Gray contributed regularly to Art in America and authored essays on Barnett Newman and David Smith whom he had also formed close friendships with. Francine, a renowned novelist and critic in her own right, was a staff reporter for The New Yorker. 

Gray exhibited at the well known Betty Parsons Gallery and his work is in the collection of: The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, The MoMA, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, The Smithsonian, The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Museum Princeton University, Rose Art Museum, The Newark Museum, The Phillips Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and most famously the Threnody murals at the Neuberger Museum. 

For further reading:  

Weber, Nicholas Fox (1998) Cleve Gray. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 

Buck, Robert, Hess, Thomas B. (1977). Cleve Gray: Paintings. Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Buck, Robert (1986) Cleve Gray Works on Paper 1940-1986, The Brooklyn Museum.

Wilkin, Karen (2007) Cleve Gray: Man and Nature, Neuberger Museum of Art.