William Anthony

William Graham Anthony was born on September 25, 1934, in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and grew up in Washington State. He majored in European history at Yale University, graduating with a B.A. in 1958, and while there took art courses, including one taught by Josef Albers. He also studied with Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League of New York, in 1958 and 1961, and studied briefly at art schools in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960s. He moved to New York in 1964 and later settled at the Westbeth Artists Community, his longtime home.

Anthony built a career on satirical, intentionally awkward parodies of art history, reworking old master and modernist compositions in a deadpan, faux-naive hand. His books include A New Approach to Figure Drawing (1965), Bible Stories (1978), Bill Anthony's Greatest Hits (1988), and War Is Swell (2000). His work was collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other institutions.

Anthony died on December 24, 2022, in New York City, at age 88, from complications after he ran into a fire that broke out a week earlier, on December 17, 2022, in his ninth-floor apartment at Westbeth.

Critics and colleagues who wrote about Anthony after his death focused on the gap between his crude, faux-inept drawing style and the sophistication of its target. A 2023 tribute in the Brooklyn Rail described him as "an artist's artist known for his satirical paintings and drawings." An obituary in CounterPunch situated his work within a career-long parody of Old Master, modernist, and contemporary art, and traced the deadpan technique in part to his years teaching beginning drawing students. The throughline in this reception is that Anthony's apparent naivete was read as a deliberate critical device rather than a limitation.

Anthony's market has developed largely outside the public auction system. Stalke Galleri in Denmark exhibited his work regularly from the mid-1990s until his death, and his work was also shown more recently at Christopher Henry Gallery in New York, but no source confirms a gallery or estate currently representing him on an ongoing basis. No reliably sourced auction record, work, price, and sale date, could be confirmed for this profile as of July 2026, and any figure circulating for his work at auction should be treated with caution until a verified sale can be documented. What is well documented is institutional demand: his work entered the collections of several major museums, a form of validation that has, for other artists, historically preceded rather than followed strong auction activity.

Anthony's market is unusual for an artist with this level of museum recognition. There is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed auction record of note, and no independently confirmed gallery or estate currently authenticating new sales. Stalke Galleri, which exhibited his work for decades, is the best-documented point of contact for provenance questions, but collectors should verify independently rather than relying on secondary-market listings, and should treat any circulating auction figures for his work as unconfirmed until a documented sale can be produced.