Experiencing Cleve Gray’s World at Hotchkiss

One does not make friends, one recognizes them, so the saying goes, and Joan Baldwin has taken this to heart. She has intelligently curated and installed an exhibition that honors Cleve Gray, the artist scholar, by bringing us into his work and studio through her selections from the Cleve Gray Flat Files. The installation at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery covers six decades, from his work in high school to the Interplay series created just two years before his death in 2004. 

An opportunity to see the contemplative life of Gray, the show feels half library and half studio. Work is pinned to slanted pedestal shelves. Watercolors, prints and drawings are mounted with bull clips, loose and unframed, so you can practically rub your nose on them. On thick deckle-edged paper, the work feels like a remnant of an event with each gesture of mark-making and color response that, either horizontal or vertical, contains it and converses with the next piece. His ink figures and watercolor landscapes all bear similar signatures with blocked tones, infused color transitions, repeated fractures of light, and screens of geometric patterning created with the long edge of his charcoal sticks.

His brushes are displayed under glass. Scumbled, frayed, split, thickly coated and caked, their disintegrating handles are evidence of Work. Large chunks of pastels, blocks of dried red and orange pigments and wax crayons are presented as relics of a life of physical commitment. A large photograph is displayed of his paint splattered studio sink. His materials look impulsive and untidy. There is a physicality emphasized, with inclusions of worn studio ephemera and text panels describing Gray’s physical breath work that preceded the painted marks. He was a striving, curious, hardworking artist.

The installation is intentionally thematic rather than chronological because of so many returns in his practice to investigations of color, line, pattern, and the open and closed compositions. Included in the show is an early portrait he drew as a teenager at Phillips Academy that heralds his interest in cubism with angular form and emotive use of color. This lens is returned to in his Paris years, his southwestern landscapes of the '50s and his vertical abstracts of the '60s.

His college thesis was on Yuan Chinese landscape painting and the theory and process became a lifelong influence. The Yuan Dynasty Chinese painters responded with their spirit to the subject and then relished the marks of the material as spontaneous and transcendent. Gray’s brushwork shows in layers of transparency built up and in the combination of dry and wet marks. In all the work you can see an interest in the calligraphic line and in experimenting with media. A long scroll landscape of the Southwest has multi-vanishing points and details lightened and darkened for emphasis, with field notations woven throughout.

After serving in World War II, young and curious, Cleve Gray stayed in Paris making art and joined other artists working in Jacques Villon’s studio. A large wall-sized diagram connects Gray, “artist, writer, farmer, friend,” to his influences in the educational, literary, musical, and artistic worlds. 

There is space for students and visitors to sit and pore over monographs and books on painting, while listening through ear pods to the music of the studio. Music is part of the experiential event and the gallery is filled with music from Shostakovich to Tchaikovsky that Gray listened to as he worked.

At the entrance to the show, Joan Baldwin has chosen a quote about the vast array of artistic concerns and the repetitive use of media that keep surfacing in the works over the decades. Gray was about movement and practice and referred to the pendulum as a way to find his own center, as reflected in Untitled, with its two mirroring brushstrokes that are black and white, transparent and opaque.

When swinging on a pendulum between black and white, one always returns to Gray.

Gray lived in Warren, Conn. This is his third exhibition at Hotchkiss. He was a parent and grandparent to Hotchkiss students. The Cleve Gray Foundation has been generous in offering us access to this work.

“Flat File: Works on Paper by Cleve Gray’” is at the Tremaine Gallery through Jan. 12, 2020, at The Hotchkiss School, 11 Interlaken Rd. Lakeville, CT. www. hotchkiss.org/art