Frances Cohen Gillespie (1939-1998) and Gregory Gillespie met when they were students at Cooper Union and married in 1959. They studied together in San Francisco, Florence, and Rome, and shared a devotion to the Italian and Flemish art of the 16th and 17th centuries. Their commitment to representational art put them at odds with prevailing styles of the 1950s and ’60s. yet they remained true to their vision, and eventually gained recognition – Gregory in the mid-1960s, and Frances, because she had put her career on hold to raise a family, a decade later. Living in Williamsburg, and later in Amherst, the two became an integral part of the artistic and intellectual life of the area and exerted an influence on numbers of younger artists.
They divorced in 1983, and for a while both their careers flourished. Frances’ meticulous flower studies in which gloxinias and chrysanthemums metamorphose into writhing, Laocoön-like presences won recognition. Because of mutual hostility stemming from their breakup, neither artist would let their work be shown alongside that of the other, despite the fact that they shared similar influences, techniques, and aesthetic values. In 1998 Frances died of cancer. Two years later, Gregory, who was increasingly subject to bouts of despair and depression, took his own life.
After their deaths, Harvard University mounted in 2004 the exhibition “Life as Art: Paintings by Gregory Gillespie and Frances Cohen Gillespie."
