How can I buy a work by William Griffin?

Bruno David Gallery handles the sale of available works by William Griffin. For prices and availability, email info@brunodavidgallery.com or call +1 314 696 2377.

Where can I see work by William Griffin in person?

At Bruno David Gallery, 7513 Forsyth Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, during public hours or by appointment.

What did William Griffin make?

Large grayscale oil paintings of human and animal bodies in motion, including torsos, dancers and horses, modeled to look sculptural against unpainted white canvas. He also designed and built floats for the Veiled Prophet Parade, which he led as artistic director.

Has William Griffin had an exhibition at Bruno David Gallery?

Yes. Horses (9 February to 30 March 2024); Recent Paintings (2008) are among his exhibitions at the gallery. Catalogues can be read in the gallery’s Publications library at brunodavidgallery.com/publications.

William Griffin

William Griffin (1950–2020) was a St. Louis-based painter who made large oil paintings of human and animal bodies in motion. He treated the body as a set of forms and shapes, stripping away extraneous detail so that a torso, a dancer’s pose, or a horse’s legs carried both physical and emotional content. His series included the Encounter paintings of 2008, the Dancer series of 2009, and, from 2012, paintings of horses. The work drew on the Old Masters and on the early 20th-century movements that broke with representation.

Griffin worked in a restricted grayscale palette on white-primed canvas. He modeled torsos and limbs so that they appeared solid and three-dimensional, then left the surrounding canvas unpainted, which emphasized the flatness of the picture surface. The paintings turned on that ambiguity: between the real and the illusory, between sculptural space and surface pattern, and between representation and abstraction.

Born in San Francisco, Griffin moved to St. Louis at the age of three. He studied painting and sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis and was invited early on to make sculptures for the Veiled Prophet Parade, long the centerpiece of the city’s Fourth of July celebration. He became a float designer, engineering the floats’ mechanisms, and from the late 1980s served as the parade’s artistic director, developing each year’s theme and leading a year-round crew of sculptors, painters, and fabricators. He was later named artistic director emeritus and lectured on parade culture at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. His work as a commercial artist also shaped a practice that included public art in sculpture and painting.

Griffin showed his paintings at Bruno David Gallery, which presented Recent Paintings in 2008 with a catalogue essay by Dickson Beall. In 2019, after nearly five decades of work on the parade, he was named honorary grand marshal of its 137th edition, by then called the VP America’s Birthday Parade. He died in March 2020. Bruno David Gallery represents the William Griffin Estate, and in 2024 it presented Horses, its first exhibition of his work since his death: paintings of horses’ legs from 2012, with an accompanying catalogue.

→ Read the Horses catalogue

→ Read the Recent Paintings catalogue

→ Inquire