克里夫.盖瑞Cleve Gray

merican artist Cleve Gray has produced a unique body of work over the past half century. The extent and character of his production are revealed in Nicholas Fox Weber's lucid study of the artist's life and accomplishments. Gray's interest in art began in early childhood and was stimulated greatly at Princeton University, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1940. In Europe during World War II, as a GI, he met the French painters Jacques Villon and Andre Lhote and studied with both men. Absorbing stimulation from Cubism and the School of Paris, Gray nevertheless pursued his own course toward a personal abstraction. In a catalogue essay for a 1977 show, the curator and museum director Robert Buck wrote that Gray's work showed "a kind of breakthrough in which an expressionist painter, originally inspired by Cubism, com- bines the legacy of American painting in the 1950s with a remarkable sense of color and space bearing no relationship to the other work of the much touted so-called color painters." Cleve Gray's career and artistic development paralleled the rise of the Abstract Expressionists and the Color Field painters and mirrored some of their concerns, but his jour-ney always remained a personal, distinctive, and indepen-dent effort that never catered to fashion. In 1972, Gray was offered a commission that resulted in what is considered his most dazzling work, a huge multi-paneled mural for the enormous central gallery in the Philip Johnson-designed Neuberger Museum on the cam-pus of the State University of New York at Purchase. Gray's Threnody, a brooding, passionate response to the horrors of the Vietnam War, was characterized by Emily Genauer in the New York Post as "the most moving and beautiful mural project in the country." Far from resting on his laurels after creating Threnody,Gray continued pursuing new ways of expression. Travel to Israel, Egypt, Rome (where he served several summers as Artist-in-Residence at the American Academy), and trips to India, Indonesia, and Japan hosted by U.S.I.A. gave birth to a long series of paintings. On all these travels Gray was accompanied by his wife, the distinguished writer Francine du Plessix Gray. Cleve Gray has also been a diligent and accomplished writer for many years. He has been a contributing editor for Art in America magazine, an essayist and editor of three volumes on the work of the artists David Smith, John Marin, and Hans Richter, and the translator of Marcel Duchamp's A l'Infinitif. Gray has remained a champion of his beliefs in words as well as in his graphic expression. In a bold essay of 1959 for American Scholar he deplored the low taste of the art.作者简介： Nicholas Fox Weber is director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He has curated exhibitions at institutions ranging from the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York, to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., to the Peggy Guggen-heim Collection in Venice. Mr. Weber is author of nu-merous articles and essays on a variety of subjects, and he has written many exhibition catalogues. He is the author of books about Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff (creators of the memorable chil-dren's book character Babar) and other artists. His book,Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art 1928-1943, received the Boston Globe's L. L.Winship Award.