Gray Foy: the name may not be familiar today, but Foy was a gifted mid-century artist, tastemaker, bon vivant, and beloved fixture of New York cultural life who, with his partner Leo Lerman of Condé Nast, hosted countless soirées over five decades, first in their brownstone on Lexington Avenue and later at their apartment in the Osborne, across from Carnegie Hall. The seemingly endless stream of illustrious guests included George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Maria Callas, Truman Capote, Carol Channing, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Martha Graham, Cary Grant, Anaïs Nin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Pavel Tchelitchew, Susan Sontag, and Anna May Wong. Having played a central role in shaping and nourishing New York City’s cultural life in his era, Foy is quite possibly the best-known individual most people have never heard of.

Today, 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 a major publication. These will 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 Institude of Chicago; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, among others, and in many private collections. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, Foy’s drawings were featured in gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his illustrations appeared in magazines and on book jackets and classical record album covers.

In fall 2018, Foy’s work will be presented in Gray Foy: Drawings 1941–1975, a lavish book to be released on September 1, 2018, by Callaway Arts & Entertainment, and in an identically named exhibition, on view at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York City, from September 14 through November 16, 2018. The extent of Foy’s gifts, widely acknowledged during his working years, will be on view for the first time in over half a century, introducing his work to new audiences.

Gray Foy

Foy arrived at the center of New York’s cultural circles circuitously. Born in Dallas to an alcoholic father, he grew up with his mother in Southern California, where, at Beverly Hills High School, his inclination towards art and theatrical design emerged. After working in a defense plant (he was asthmatic and did not serve in the Armed Forces), Foy returned to Dallas in 1946 to study art at Southern Methodist University. A trip to Boston and New York took him to the offices of View, a well-regarded cultural magazine that accepted one of his drawings for publication—essentially launching his career. In the spring of 1947, Foy moved to New York and, never shy, took a portfolio to The Museum of Modern Art’s legendary curator Dorothy C. Miller, who provided a list of possible galleries to approach. Foy was immediately accepted at now shuttered Durlacher Bros., a 57th Street gallery that traded in Old Master drawings but also exhibited works by Magic Realists such as Peter Blume and Pavel Tchelitchew and Surrealists such as Kurt Seligmann.

Foy’s exceptional first few years in New York set the template for a life immersed in arts and letters. Durlacher included his works in group shows and, in 1951 and 1957, in solo exhibitions. He became involved in the social circles of Constance and R. Kirk Askew Jr.—Durlacher’s owner and director, whose Park Avenue salons were attended by Alfred H. Barr Jr., Aaron Copland, E.E. Cummings, Lincoln Kirstein, Philip Johnson, Virgil Thomson, and many others.

Foy was also written up in a lengthy feature in the New York Herald Tribune, where he was described as “a superb craftsman, a young person who will someday be reckoned with in the field of modern art” and favorably noticed in several other publications, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Foy’s Untitled [Figure with Segmented Torso] (ca. 1946), was donated to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, his first drawing to enter a museum collection. He received portrait commissions from Lincoln Kirstein and Philip Johnson, and other works were purchased by Stephen Carlton Clark Sr., founder of the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, NY; Mademoiselle managing editor Cyrilly Abels; and Paul J. Sachs, scion of Goldman Sachs, among other renowned collectors of the day.

In September 1948, Foy moved into Lerman’s brownstone apartment on Lexington Avenue at 94th Street, where they lived together for 19 years. Lerman wrote to a friend that Foy “is really one of the greatest draftsmen I have ever seen and wonderfully beautiful. You will adore him—everyone does.” Socially, they hosted parties that were attended by John Gielgud, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Diana Vreeland, among many other notables. Settled down with Lerman, Foy entered ever-expanding social circles that ultimately comprised a Who’s Who of New York’s social set. Foy continued drawing and exhibiting his work at Durlacher and in juried shows at the Whitney. In 1953, his drawing Dimensions won the top prize in the Met’s “American Watercolors, Drawings, and Prints, 1952,” a major juried exhibition.

That same year he started illustrating Mademoiselle’s annual “Christmas Classified” and “All Through the House” gift guides. Foy also began designing book jackets and album covers in the new 12-inch-square format of LPs, and illustrating fiction and features for Mademoiselle. His noteworthy book jackets include the first editions of J.R. Salamanca’s 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) retained such renown that it was posthumously reprinted on the hundredth-anniversary commemorative DVD edition (2013).