Gay artist Grey Foy was an American unique. Born in Dallas in 1922 and educated at Southern Methodist College, he arrived in New York Metropolis in 1947, preternaturally good-looking and totally in charge of a mature creative imaginative and prescient.
In 1948, the New York Herald Tribune praised Foy as “an outstanding craftsman, a teenager who will sometime be reckoned with within the area of recent artwork.” That very same 12 months, he met the person who would develop into his life accomplice of fifty years, Leo Lerman, a extremely influential editor at Condé Nast for 4 many years.
Collectively, they constructed a golden life within the beau monde of mid-century Manhattan, cultivating a circle of associates from the creative and cultural elite. Foy ran with such boldfaced names as Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, George Balanchine, and Margot Fonteyn.
When Foy died on the age of 90 in 2012, an obituary within the New York Occasions hailed him as “an artist and avatar of a gilded age,” praising him as “a tastemaker, bon vivant, salonnier, partygoer, party-giver, genteel accumulator, and perennial fixture of New York cultural life.”
Now, a decade after his dying, Houston’s Menil Drawing Institute is presenting a retrospective entitled Hyperreal: Grey Foy, a part of an effort to introduce his arrestingly imaginative work to a wider viewers. The exhibition options nearly three dozen of his meticulous drawings and industrial artwork, tracing the arc of his profession from the Forties to the Seventies. It’s the first solo museum exhibition for the artist, and it celebrates two main presents of 80 items of Foy’s work, which can make the Menil Drawing Institute the biggest repository of his artwork on the planet. The exhibition is curated by Kirsten Marples, who spent 18 months immersing herself within the artist’s work.
Rebecca Rabinow, director of The Menil Assortment, noticed, “Grey Foy’s uncommon expertise caught the attention of a number of the savviest drawings connoisseurs of the mid-Twentieth century, however as a result of Foy stopped working mid-career, he’s not well-known in the present day.”
His work loved highly effective champions, together with actor Steve Martin, who bought Foy’s Dimensions and donated it to the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York Metropolis. An early large-scale work from 1945 and 1946, Dimensions exemplifies the astonishing element and mesmerizing surrealistic imaginative and prescient that characterised a lot of Foy’s early oeuvre. (The Menil helpfully gives magnifying glasses to permit viewers to savor the minute particulars of Foy’s graphite-on-paper artistry.)
Of Dimensions, the esteemed artwork critic Robert Pincus-Witten noticed, “The image demonstrates what’s most arresting about Foy’s expertise—a talented, hyper-obsessional remark of human figures or exfoliating flowers and unbelievable particulars rendered as if he have been transcribing them by way of a jeweler’s loupe. Such intense focus recollects the backgrounds of Northern Renaissance portray—Jan van Eyck, for instance.”
Foy spent between ten and 13 months creating Dimensions, and he typically lavished that a lot time on his different graphite drawings. He could be paid $100 for a drawing, which made the economics of his creative profession a problem.
A refined undercurrent of homoeroticism runs by way of a number of the works from this early interval which can be on show at The Menil, most notably in Untitled (Nudes Rising from Botanical and Avian Varieties) from 1948.
By the tip of the Forties, Foy had begun to distance himself from surrealism. “Please don’t put me down as a surrealist,” Foy informed an interviewer in 1948. “I could transform a realist. In spite of everything, hyper-realism truly turns into the supernatural.” This notion of transcending seen actuality is a by way of line inside Foy’s physique of labor.
Foy started to develop an ecological consciousness, steadily depicting flowers and vegetation. Of his work from this era, New York Occasions critic Stuart Preston noticed, “Foy’s pencil and brush spin out a tissue of delicacy and transparency, gentle sufficient to appear to have settled on the paper like frost, sturdy sufficient to have netted in its gossamer texture sufficient visible knowledge in regards to the plant types to astound a botanist.”
In 1961, he was awarded a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, and took a 12 months to create the large-scale watercolor and graphite on paper The Third Kingdom, additionally on show within the exhibition.
Artwork historian Pincus-Witten known as these later items from the Fifties and ’60s “his greatest work.”
However even in his late drawings, topics ostensibly drawn from the pure world, reminiscent of 1970’s Untitled (Botanical Globe with Rising Life Varieties), are imbued with a surreal thriller that lingers hauntingly within the viewer’s thoughts.
WHAT: Hyperreal: Grey Foy artwork exhibition
WHEN: Via September 3
WHERE: The Menil Drawing Institute, 1412 West Major St.
INFO: menil.org/drawing-institute
