JAMES
MCCRAY
Painter, Teacher,
1912-1993
By the mid 1940s, while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, he developed a unique geometric style. McCray's style is completely different from anything produced around him in the Bay Area at that time. In the 1950s, while he succumbed to the vogue for painterly expression as exemplified by Abstract Expressionism, he returned in the mid-1960s to the format that gave him the most personal satisfaction - abstract design. The later works, however, have more of the feel of the then popular Post-Painterly Geometric Abstraction.
- Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media
Education
and Teaching
University of California Berkeley, B.A. 1934; M.A. 1935; U.C. Berkeley,
1936; Teaching assistant to Worth Ryder and John Haley; Barnes Foundation,
Merion, Pennsylvania; Grant to study aesthetics in Europe, 1937-1939;
U.C. Berkeley, 1939-1940; Teaching assistant, California School of Fine
Arts, 1941-1946; U.C. Berkeley, Teacher, 1947-1982, Professor Emeritus,
1982.
Selected
Solo and Group Exhibitions 1935-1966
Oakland Art Gallery, 1935; Golden Gate International Exposition,
1940; 57th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition San Francisco
Art Association (from 1961, The San Francisco Art Institute) at the San
Francisco Museum of Art, 1937; 60th Annual, 1940; 62nd Annual,
1942; 65th Annual, 1945 (awarded Anne Bremer Memorial Prize for
abstract painting titled 'Reticulation,' Alfred Frankenstein, the noted
art critic wrote of this work, "McCray has produced the most original
and interesting new development in painting that has manifested itself
on this coast in my time"); 68th-69th Annual, 1949-1950; 74th-76th
Annual, 1955-1957; 78th-80th Annual, 1959-1961; Fifty- Eighth
Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, Abstract and Surreal
American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, 1948; Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Phillips Memorial Gallery,
Washington D.C.; Third-Fifth Winter Invitational, California Palace
of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1962, 1963, 1964; Salon de Realité,
Paris; Institute of Creative Arts Grant, 1965-66.
Background
McCray's education encompasses both European and American modernist movements.
While at the Barnes Foundation, his strongest influence was the geometric
abstraction of Mondrian. By 1945, McCray's geometric abstraction won the
coveted Anne Bremer prize and another was exhibited in the Art Institute
of Chicago's Abstract and Surrealist American Art in 1948. By 1950,
McCray turned away from geometry and followed a path toward color field
minimalist abstraction, as did Reinhardt, who was also influenced by Mondrian
and whom he met in 1949 when Reinhardt taught summer school at the California
School of Fine Arts.
McCray evolved into colorful gestural paintings by the mid to late 1950s. In the early 1960s, his energy flowed into a series of circular colorful hard edge geometric abstractions influenced by the Rythme series of Sonia and Robert Delaunay he had seen while studying aesthetics in Europe during 1938-39 on a Barnes Foundation grant. Notable artists that studied with McCray include Sam Francis and John Grillo.