NEW YORK, NY.- Gray Foy: the name may not be familiar today, but Foy was a gifted midcentury artist, tastemaker, and beloved fixture of New York cultural life. Six years after his death at 90, and over 40 years since he stopped creating art, Gray Foy (1922–2012) is the subject of a landmark exhibition and publication. These bring to light his prodigious talent as an artist and draftsman, one whose works may be found in major American museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others, and in numerous private collections. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, Foy’s drawings were featured in gallery and museum exhibitions and his illustrations appeared in magazines and on book jackets and classical record album covers.

This fall, Foy’s work is presented in Gray Foy: Drawings 1941–1975, a lavish book published on September 1, 2018, by Callaway Arts & Entertainment, and in an identically named exhibition, on view at Francis Naumann Fine Art in New York City, from September 15 through November 16, 2018. The extent of Foy’s gifts is visible for the first time in over half a century, reintroducing his work to new audiences.

Gray Foy
Foy arrived at the center of New York’s cultural circles circuitously. Born in Dallas, he grew up with his mother in Southern California. After working in a defense plant in Burbank during WWII, Foy returned to Dallas in 1946 to study art at Southern Methodist University and the following year at Columbia University in New York. View, the well-regarded Surrealist magazine, published one of his drawings in 1946—essentially launching his career. Foy was represented by Durlacher Bros., a 57th Street gallery that traded in Old Master drawings alongside works by Magic Realists and Surrealists.

Foy was featured in the New York Herald Tribune, where he was described as “a superb craftsman who will someday be reckoned with in the field of modern art,” and favorably noticed in The New York Times, the New Yorker, and Art in America. Foy continued drawing and exhibiting his work in solo exhibitions at Durlacher and in six juried Annuals at the Whitney. In 1953, his drawing Dimensions won the top prize in a major juried exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Foy also began designing book jackets and album covers. His noteworthy book jackets include the first editions of Lilith (1961) and Ray Bradbury’s Something Evil This Way Comes (1962). His album cover for Leonard Bernstein’s recording of Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (1957) was posthumously reprinted on the hundredth-anniversary commemorative DVD edition in 2013.

A Rediscovery
Following Foy’s death in 2012, a significant cache of his drawings was found hidden away in drawers and closets in his apartment. A five-year research project prompted by this discovery located many additional works in museums and private collections. This exhibition and monograph are initial steps in advancing a reevaluation of Foy’s work.

The Drawings
Foy, working largely in pencil and on an intimate scale suitable for the density of his compositions, sometimes spent months working on a single drawing, using techniques so highly meticulous that he produced only about 100 drawings altogether (excluding his commercial illustrations). The late art historian Robert Pincus-Witten wrote that “Gray Foy’s drawings are delineated with such delicacy that they render invisible the actual pressure of the mark upon the paper’s surface, as if the imagery miraculously had been blown into place.”

Foy’s art of the 1940s aligns with Surrealism, though he preferred the term “super-realism.” Figures, and everyday objects and interiors are strangely transformed. During WWII, Foy’s drawings reflected the disintegration and disfiguration of the physical world. In Foy’s largest drawing of this period, Dimensions (ca. 1945–46, MoMA, featured in the exhibition), disparate figures, interior furnishings, vegetation, and geometric shapes pulsate through a three-dimensional space where the spatial trickery evokes that of M.C. Escher.

Foy’s mature works of the 1950s through the 1970s focus on botanical and geological subject matter, both natural and imaginary. In some of Foy’s final ecological studies, the fantasy-like representation of the botanical life and geology evokes his Surrealist roots even as the artist explores on paper the mysteries of the biomass. Artist Alexis Rockman describes one effect: “The paper on which these microcosms are drawn seems to be rotting from the images it records.” As curator Stephen C. Wicks has written, “The rich array of textures serves as a seductive skin beneath which the artist’s plant forms appear to germinate, writhe, and wither.”

Exhibition and Monograph
The Fall 2018 exhibition and the publication Gray Foy: Drawings 1941–1975 present Foy’s life and art in depth. Most of the drawings are being published and exhibited for the first time in five decades. The retrospective at Francis Naumann Fine Art (24 West 57th Street, New York), which specializes in Dada and Surrealist art, features 31 works on paper, including five on loan from museum collections.

The oversized, 204-page monograph—with 172 color illustrations and two foldouts—from Callaway Arts & Entertainment is edited and designed by graphic designer Don Quaintance, and includes essays by art historian and curator Lynn M. Herbert and contemporary artist Alexis Rockman, with a foreword by actor and author Steve Martin, a friend of Foy’s. It is available for $60 at bookstores and museum shops nationally and online.