Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) was a students at Cooper Union and married Frances Cohen 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 the prevailing styles of the 1950s and ’60s. 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. Gregory’s large, obsessively detailed self-portraits gained increasing critical attention.
Frances died in 1998 of cancer and 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.
