Cy Twombly - Editions & Works on Paper New York Monday, October 24, 2022 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Property from the Estate of David B. Boyce, a figure in the 1970s art scene  

     

    David Bartlett Boyce (1949–2014) was a writer, curator, art historian, and active member of the art scene in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1970s. A close friend to many of the most important artists of the time––including Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal––Boyce also worked as a studio assistant for such acclaimed artists such as Jasper Johns, Tom Wesselmann and Joseph Cornell. It was Boyce who introduced Mapplethorpe to the gallerist Holly Solomon, and the artist’s subsequent shows at the gallery launched the young photographer into art world stardom.i

     

    George Segal, Gay Liberation, commissioned 1979, installed 1992 (David Boyce pictured left)

    Boyce was a key figure in the Gay Liberation movement after the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn. When George Segal was commissioned to create a sculpture to commemorate the riots in 1979, the artist asked Boyce to model for him.ii Consisting of four figures in two same-sex couples, Segal’s Gay Liberation was installed outside the Stonewall Inn in 1992 as a memorial to the violence and discrimination against the LGBTQ community, as well as a celebration of the progress that the community has witnessed since 1969.

     

    Following the excitement that the Greenwich Village art scene witnessed in the 1970s, Boyce left New York City in the early 1980s. From 1996 to 1999, he returned to school at Goddard College to obtain a master's degree in Creative Writing and Gay Studies. After receiving this degree, Boyce lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as an art critic for the Standard Times and a curator at the New Bedford Art Museum.iii Until his passing in 2014, Boyce remained an influential voice in the art world. Today he is remembered as a symbol of the Gay Liberation movement, a patron of the arts, and a friend to many in the art world and beyond.

     

    i Lasse Antonsen, “David B. Boyce, cast as one of the four figures in George Segal’s Gay Liberation Monument, dies at 65,” Artscope, January 7, 2015, online
    ii Peggi Medeiros, “Remembering David Boyce, New Bedford's link to art history,” SouthCoast TODAY, January 17, 2015, online
    iii Lasse Antonsen, “David B. Boyce, cast as one of the four figures in George Segal’s Gay Liberation Monument, dies at 65,” Artscope, January 7, 2015.

    • Artist Biography

      Cy Twombly

      American • 1928 - 2011

      Cy Twombly emerged in the mid-1950s alongside New York artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. While at first developing a graffiti-like style influenced by Abstract Expressionist automatism–having notably studied under Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell at the legendary Black Mountain College between 1951 and 1952–Twombly was a prominent figure in the new generation of artists that challenged the abstract orthodoxy of the New York School. Twombly developed a highly unique pictorial language that found its purest expression upon his life-defining move to Rome in 1957. Simultaneously invoking classical history, poetry, mythology and his own contemporary lived experience, Twombly's visual idiom is distinguished by a remarkable vocabulary of signs and marks and the fusion of word and text. 

      Cy Twombly produced graffiti-like paintings that were inspired by the work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. His gestural forms of lines, drips and splattering were at first not well-received, but the artist later became known as the leader of the estrangement from the Abstract Expressionism movement. Full of energy and rawness, Twombly's pieces are reminiscent of childhood sketches and reveal his inspiration from mythology and poetry.

      View More Works

PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF DAVID B. BOYCE

217

Lot offered with No Reserve

Leo Castelli Gallery exhibition poster

1967
Offset lithograph, on thin wove paper, the full sheet.
S. 22 x 25 7/8 in. (55.9 x 65.7 cm)
Signed in white pencil, from the edition of unknown size, published by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, for the exhibition Cy Twombly, October 7 – 26, 1967, unframed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$2,000 - 3,000 

Sold for $8,820

Contact Specialist

Editions@phillips.com

212 940 1220

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 24 - 26 October 2022