Lot 60
Lot of 2 architectural drawings: Kenneth John Conant, (1894 - 1984), Don Gray, (b. 1935)
Kenneth John Conant (1894 - 1984) Cathedral Tower at Toledo, Spain, graphite on paper. Signed and titled lower left. Provenance: Arthur H. Harlow and Co., NY.
Don Gray (b. 1935) Casa Allegra, 1964, graphite on paper. Signed, dated, and titled lower right
Biography for Kenneth John Conant from ArtHistorians.info: Archaeologist-historian of medieval architecture, particularly of the monastery buildings at Cluny. Conant was the son of son of John F. Conant and Lucie Mickelsen (Conant). He grew up in the paper-producing town of Neenah, Wisconsin, entering Harvard University in 1911. While taking fine arts courses, he took an architecture course offered by Herbert Langford Warren, founder of the Harvard School of Architecture. Conant continued at Harvard after graduation, studying (practicing) architecture at the School. He received a fellowship for study at l'école des Chartes and école due Louvre under Marcel Aubert, despite the war in Europe.
In 1917 with the United States' entry in World War I, Conant enlisted in the 42nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force in the engineering corps. He was wounded in the second battle of the Marne in 1918. With a master's degree in architecture, he joined the firm of Perry, Shaw and Hepburn, Boston, in 1919. During a 1920 summer trip to Europe, Conant encountered the Harvard medievalist A. Kingsley Porter. Porter's charismatic enthusiasm for medieval architecture swayed Conant toward architectural history. Conant returned Harvard working as an instructor while writing his dissertation under Porter, The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in 1925.
He married Marie Schneider in 1923 (later divorced). At Porter's suggestion, Conant visited the site of the great monastery complex remains of Cluny in 1924. Cluny would be his life's work. In order to learn archaeological techniques, he signed on to digs at Chichen-Itza in 1926 and then Pueblo Bonito in Mexico. Conant was appointed as a professor of architecture in the School of Architecture (not Fine Arts), where he remained teaching a heavy courseload throughout his life. His first Cluny excavation, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, was in 1927. Actual digging began in 1928, expanding in mission and scope with funds provided by the Medieval Society of America, concluding (with interruptions) only in 1950.
The excitement Conant generated personally regarding his discoveries can partially be gauged in the reconstructed medieval courtyard of the Fogg Art Museum, created from casts of Conant's finds in the 1930s. In 1933 at the 13th International Congress of the History of Art, Stockholm, he traveled with a group of medievalists including Richard Hamann, Hans R. Hahnloser and Paul Frankl, lead by Johnny Roosval, to see the discovery of the only gothic church still with its wooden arch scaffolding remaining (Frankl). He became a full professor in 1936. Conant's Cluny work rankled many French scholars, in part because he insisted on Porter's early dating of the capitals, and partially because he was a field archaeologist. Burgundian scholars, such as Jean Virey (1861-1953) and Charles Oursel (1876-1967), remained enthusiastic.
Conant's second interest was in eastern church architecture. He participated in the Kiev excavations of 1936-38 and converted to Orthodox Christianity. In 1940, many of his former students established the Society of Architectural Historians, citing him as inspiration. During World War II, Conant delivered one of the "public lectures on fine arts" at Johns Hopkins (published 1950) and the Wimmer lecture for 1947, "Benedictine Contributions to Church Architecture." After Walter Gropius became head of the School of Architecture, history of architecture courses were no longer required, but Conant's classes always remained filled.
Conant retired in 1955 and the following year married Isabel Pope, a musicologist. In 1959 he published the volume on Romanesque architecture for the prestigious Pelican History of Art series (volume 13) and the same year, the citizens of Cluny named the street in front of the church "Rue K. J. Conant." Cluny had become for Conant the consuming passion, the embodiment of all the important events of the Romanesque: the use of doorway sculpture, the synthesizing of the international style, and the first use of the pointed arch. After the 1968 Cluny: les églises et la maison du chef d'ordre Conant's claims for the total primacy of Cluny as a monument began to be questioned more by scholars; Conant's achievement, which is great, was clouded by his at times elliptical arguments for the supremacy of the building in art history. A revised edition of the Pelican History volume appeared in 1978.
He died of cancer and is buried in Mout Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA. Conant's enthusiasm for medieval architecture was part of the early 20th-century belief that the middle ages held a key for contemporary life. In this he was spurred on not only by Porter, but also by another friend, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, (1863-1942) ("the American Goth") who designed in the medieval style. Conant's methodology was to make accurate measurements and drawings of the archaeological remains of buildings, and the, using his knowledge of masonry types, date the various building campaigns. His architectural drawing skills resulted in some of the first detailed renderings of the monuments he studied.
His sole intent in excavation was to discover objects (architectural elements); his lack of concern for archaeological strata on which they were found was less out of carelessness than a lack of uniform world archaeological standard. Conant's scholarship, most clearly discerned in his Brief Commentary on Early Medieval Church Architecture (1942), frequently relied on buildings known solely from architectural projections constructed from only their foundations.
His work is often more speculative than it appears. He avoided the social context in which the buildings were produced. Ironically, that aspect of medieval architectural history, Peter Ferguson noted, came to the United States via French art historians Marcel Aubert and Henri Focillon, and the Germanic émigrés trained in Kulturgeschichte. Richard Krautheimer, for one, did not approve of Conant's Pelican History of Art volume (Sears). Conant was convinced that Cluny was the acme of the artistic revival of the 11th and 12th centuries. Conant wrote so convincingly of Cluny's appearance that the medievalist Linda Seidel quipped, "you'd think he worshiped there every Sunday."
Biography from the Archives of askART: The following, submitted April 2004, is from the artist.
Don Gray paints realistic still-lifes, landscapes, figures and self-portraits in acrylic, pastel, casein (opaque watercolor) and oil. He has an extensive record of exhibitions, and is represented in private and corporate collections. He is married to expressionist landscape painter, Jessie Benton Evans.
Gray has always been committed to the reality of the world we see and live in, considering himself a poetic-realist painter. He feels that the common objects of the world -- apples, rocks, trees -- in addition to people, are not only beautiful in themselves, but resonate with deep feeling and spiritual presence. He feels there is a fundamental truth of life residing in these things of the world, not only in how they look, but in their density of form. Despite the realism of his work, he is less concerned with detailed, photographic, surface realism than with fundamental, rock-solid form, which he equates with the ultimate meaning of existence.
Gray feels more of a connection with artists of the past whose art directly reflected the world and their experience of it. They used reality as a vehicle for the expression of timeless human emotions and aspirations, whereas many contemporary artists do not. This is one reason why in many of his still-lifes, he will place art books with paintings of such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Cezanne and Van Gogh as objects in his still-lifes. The books express the relationship he feels with these artists and his belief in their artistic philosophies, as well as using their images to enhance the beauty and symbolic meaning of his own still-life paintings.
Like other introspective artists, Don Gray has painted and drawn a number of self-portraits in a variety of media. In many respects, he considers himself a draughtsman-painter, an artist very involved with drawing. Because of this and his love of color, pastels have loomed large in his work. While primarily a still-life painter, he has also worked extensively with landscape.
Gray received his B.A. degree in art from Arizona State University; his M.A. degree in art from the University of Iowa.
Born in California, but raised in Arizona (and now living there), Gray's extensive arts background is centered in New York City, where he lived for twenty-five years. A poet and art critic as well as a painter, Gray wrote in New York for the New York Arts Journal, Times Herald-Record newspaper, Applause and Sunstorm magazines, and as Senior Editor of Art World.
Biography for Don Gray: Living in Phoenix, Arizona for the past ten years, he was Visual Arts Editor of Ashes arts newspaper. In New York he produced and moderated "Artist and Critic," a program on art on Manhattan Cable Television, interviewing artists Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Alice Neel, Raphael Soyer, Isabel Bishop, critics Dore Ashton, John Canaday, Theodore Wolff, collector Robert Scull. Other programs included Monet at Giverny (with Metropolitan Museum of Art); Expressive Symbolism in Cezanne; Matisse; The Mechanization of Art: Effects of Technology on 20th Century Art; Rembrandt and Van Gogh: The Self-Portrait.
About his paintings, Art News describes Gray's "passion and seriousness extraordinary intensity of feeling, keen intelligence and a thorough knowledge of art past and presentHis works have a riveting immediacy yet function on a symbolic level as well. Although the concept of the 'masterpiece' seems to have gone out of style, this is a word that constantly comes to mind in confronting Gray's major works." The Christian Science Monitor says, "Thisis the kind of picture earlier artists produced to establish their right to be called 'master.'" The New York Times
States, "The compelling intensity of Don Gray's figures makes an immediate, striking impression, and these paintings have a tendency to dominate the gallery." The Philadelphia Inquirer says, "These emphatic works feature a greater virtuosity in paint handling than we commonly see today." 11 1/8"H x 8 1/2"W Born in 1948, Don Gray credit's his earliest inspirations to the landscape of his childhood in rural northeast Oregon. He studied art at Eastern Oregon University, training his eye and hand in traditional techniques that resulted in meticulously rendered realist paintings.After graduation in 1970, Gray taught high school art for one year, before beginning a professional art career. He exhibited widely in the Pacific Northwest, developing a regional following for his landscapes and figures.In 1978 Gray formed a partnership, Bear Wallow Publishing, with writer Rick Steber and photographer Jerry Gildemeister. Their co-creations were coffee-table style illustrated books of western history. Traces, published in 1980, documented the last surviving travelers of the Oregon Trail.In the mid-1980's, Don Gray's realist style began to change as he experimented with a more spontaneous approach. His current work combines the traditional with a more contemporary idiom, as exterior observation gives way to interior search. Gray describes this process as "like a random walk in the woods, with no idea where it might lead. Along the way, free association and unexpected discoveries are encouraged. The paintings become artifacts of an intuitive process, not literal representations of pre-determined ideas or images."Don Gray has taught occasional workshops and college-level courses, painted indoor and outdoor murals in several states, and illustrated over twenty books. He and his wife Brenda live in Murrieta, California.
- Dimensions: 11 3/4" x 7"W (sight), 18 1/2" x 13" (mat) (Cathedral Tower)
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