312

Bill Rice

1931-2006

Four Men. 1974.

Oil on linen canvas
24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm.)

  • Provenance: Private collection.

    Bill Rice was an artist and member of the East Village scene, born in Vermont and graduated from Middlebury College. Rice moved into an apartment on Third Avenue in Manhattan in 1953, which resulted in him creating a body of work focusing on the life and daily scenes of the neighborhood. His canvases, poetic, densely layered, and heavily guided by the grid, are abstract in their backgrounds and figurative in the foreground. Rice depicted figures from the East Village featuring African American and Latin men throughout the neighborhood in the 1960s to 80s, a time when the East Village consisted of tenements, vacant alleys and garages, and men's shelters. His depictions, racially and sexually charged, were seen as provocative and not commercially viable to the art market. His lifelong study of male figures in the East Village acts as voyeuristic and yearning, looking for a way to lift the veil between the painter and the subject.
  • Condition:
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August 21, 2025 10:30 AM EDT
New York, NY, US

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