Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work
Heckscher Museum of Art
February 7-April 18, 2004
SELECTED THEMES IN THE WORK OF RED GROOMS
by Susan W. Knowles, Guest Curator
PORTRAITS AND SELF PORTRAITS
Red Grooms came of age in the shadow of the Abstract Expressionists, when the words "artist" and "ego" suddenly became synonyms. After deciding that the introductory level classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were too slow-paced and academic for his taste, Grooms was drawn to New York to try out his own form of social realism under painter Gregorio Prestopino at the New School for Social Research. Grooms' powers of satirical observation pulled him like a magnet to the boisterous consumer culture all around him on the streets of New York in the late 1950s. His tuned-in sensibilities placed him in the avant-garde of Pop art. "I rather cleverly aligned myself with Pop even before it happened," he said in a recent interview. "I actually thought it was coming." Grooms' version of Pop remained immersed in the immediacy of his environment. He painted scenes populated by the "characters" that he saw in the world around him. Grooms never developed the detached stance of such Pop practitioners as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein or James Rosenquist. Instead he painted his own life, and became, literally, an actor on the stage of life -- in this case the art-as-life "happenings" of the downtown New York scene.
Grooms'
earliest print, "Minstrel," reveals the persona most often
seen in his early work. He is an actor: a top hat-clad vaudeville-show
character calling our attention to himself. Grooms, who is naturally
modest and even perhaps a bit shy, claims always to have been a bit
of a ham and a prankster. Here he captures for us the delightful
but tingling shock waves of being onstage, which many artists will
tell you is the same exact feeling as walking into an exhibit opening "Minstrel" was,
in fact, an announcement for an unnamed show. Forcefully and confidently
cut from a sheet of linoleum, this small image is magnified by its
emotional content. The artist, dressed in formal top hat, faces us
with eyes wide open and both hands up, fingers splayed out as if
in surprise -- Artist meets World. (right: Mayan Self Portrait ,
1966, linocut, 25 x 18 1/2 inches)
Grooms saw prints at first as useful publicity pieces, such as posters for shows. "Red Grooms, Martin Wiley Gallery," which reveals his face inside The Parthenon at Nashville's Centennial Park, was printed in both color and black-and-white offset versions for a 1978 exhibition at a Nashville gallery owned by Terry Martin and Gene (Wiley Eugene) Sizemore.
Friends and family are featured in many prints, such as artist and studio assistant David Saunders, shown working with Grooms in Bud Shark' s studio in the lithograph "Red Grooms Drawing David Saunders Drawing Red Grooms," and Grooms' mother Wilhelmina Rogers Grooms, depicted in full-length seated profile, almost as if she were "Whistler's Mother." "Grooms's Mother on Her 81st Birthday," a color lithograph, was printed in an edition of 81 by Mauro Giuffrida at American Atelier, New York.
Mr. Fox Trot , the mascot of Grooms' working circus carousel in Nashville's Riverfront Park, is a self-portrait of sorts, modeled on the wild red foxes that still dart across country roads at night in the far suburbs of town.
THE CITY
Grooms
first introduces the theme of the city in the etching "Self
Portrait in a Crowd," his first commissioned print. Created
in 1962 and printed two years later at Atelier Georges Leblanc, Paris,
it was included in a portfolio with prints by many other artists
entitled "The International Anthology of Contemporary Engraving:
the International Avant-Garde: America Discovered." Here Grooms
shows himself as a jaunty, striding figure wearing a stovepipe hat
on a busy city street. (The "Walking Man" persona had been
invented for Grooms's first performance theater piece in September
1959.) In this small etching, the man is placed in silhouette against
a crowd scene where everyone else is facing forward, an image reminiscent
of Belgian artist James Ensor's "The Entry of Christ into Brussels
in 1889." (left: Slushing , 1971, color lithograph,
22 x 28 inches)
"Parade in Top Hat City," (1993) a drypoint printed by the artist, shows Grooms and other top-hatted figures standing up on the tops of buildings for a better view of one of New York's frequent street parades.
Grooms
has said that the "No Gas" series was the impetus for the
large-scale walk-through city environment "Ruckus Manhattan," which
was completed about five years later. "Local," a lithograph
in ten colors produced by Mauro Giuffrida at the Bank Street Atelier
in New York, was a forerunner of the life-sized version in "Ruckus
Manhattan." The busy image takes us underground to a claustrophobic
encounter with particularly strange-looking strangers. "Subway" is
a more cheerful version in a three-dimensional color lithograph produced
by Shark's Ink.
Back out on the streets, "Little Italy," a color lithograph printed on five sheets and assembled by four Shark's Ink staffers, has us looking down onto a city street from a very exaggerated perspective. Buildings seem to tilt in towards the street with angled fire escapes dangling dangerously over a street filled with cars and people.
The "Hot Dog Vendor" is a long-time favorite subject of Grooms' that has been attempted in several versions, including a cacophonous and monumental welded metal outdoor version. The lithographic entity of "Hot Dog Vendor" has been enhanced by master printer Bud Shark's use of metal foil on the cart.
The "Flatiron Building" (1996) is an etching whose rosy sunset tones were achieved in aquatint under the expert guidance of intaglio printmakers Carol Weaver and Felix Harlan in New York. This famously recognizable structure looks us square in the eye -- that is if we can find a 13th floor perch across the intersection from it. (right: Flatiron Building , 1966, color etching with soft ground and aquatint, 45 x 26 inches)
POPULAR CULTURE
By
his own account, Red Grooms was always drawn to drama and spectacle.
In Nashville, Tennessee, where he spent his childhood, that meant
anything from attending Symphony concerts at the ornate War Memorial
Auditorium, to going to the annual Christmas pageant at the city's
full-scale concrete replica of the Parthenon, or hanging out downtown
and watching barge life on the Cumberland River. Under the intense
scrutiny of the observant young Charles Grooms, a wide range of dramatis
personae began to appear in his world. In the Nashville of
the 1950s, it was possible to take a big swallow of both high and
low culture in one gulp. The real Mr. Peanut strolled around the
downtown Arcade, a turn-of-the-century shopping mall, handing out
fresh-roasted peanuts to potential customers of The Peanut Shop.
When the State Fair came to town, with its arts and crafts shows,
prize-winning canned goods, sideshows, and carnival rides, it put
down stakes right next to the Nashville Speedway. Grooms remembers
seeing art in the Women's Building and afterwards sketching his first
crowd scene of the teeming racetrack grandstand. A neighbor on the
same quiet, large-lawned Nashville street was Sarah Ophelia Colley
(Mrs. Henry) Cannon, who had once attended Nashville's Ward-Belmont
School for Young Ladies. Sarah Cannon turned into "Howdeee,
I'm Minnie Pearl" on Friday and Saturday evenings at the Grand
Ole Opry. Grooms has since said that the 1890s Ryman Auditorium,
where the Opry was held, made him nervous because it seemed like
a firetrap. Perhaps this early fear of an out-of-control fire in
urban setting was the impetus for the recurring theme of heroic firefighters
who appeared in early plays and performance pieces like "The
Burning Building" in New York City. (right: Elvis, 1987,
color lithograph, 44 1/2 x 30 inches)
Even
now, Red Grooms revels in the celebration of all walks of life. He
pays homage to cheap eats at the "No Gas Café" and
the "Red-Bud Diner" just as sincerely as he constructs
a tribute to the grand dining experience of French chef de nouvelle
cuisine Paul Bocuse. Perhaps his exposure to the panoply of cultures
available in the "Athens of the South," (aka "Music
City U.S.A.") helps to explain why. (right: Slam Dunk ,
1992, 3D lithograph)
"Coney Island," a vibrant four color aquatint printed by Jennifer Melby, captures the mania of a hot summer's day at this legendary beach where it's often standing-room only, both on the sand and in the water.
"Lorna Doone," a lithograph in eleven colors with collage and rubber stamping on two sheets of custom made Japanese Gyoko paper, is an example of the extravagant treatment for which Minneapolis printmaker Steve Anderson is well-known.
This seven color lithograph shows Actor-Director Charlie Chaplin, who was a pioneer in using humor both as entertainment and powerful social commentary. The print was done on two sheets and carefully put together by Roseanne Colachis, who has been the main 3-D assembler for Grooms' prints at Shark's Ink since 1985.
Tennessee's best-known export: here's Elvis at the height of his popularity, proudly posing with his solid gold Cadillac, with big-haired wife Priscilla on the front steps of Graceland Mansion in the background of this eleven color lithograph done at Shark's Ink.
THE ART WORLD
Beginning
with the tiny linocut "Five Futurists" in 1958, Red Grooms
has celebrated his own existence as an artist by paying homage to
many of the most important figures in Western art history. Styles
often change dramatically to suit the next subject that comes his
way. We see this in some of the individual images that led up to
his second major print suite, the "19th Century Artists" series:
ten small black-and-white etchings of French artists done in 1976.
In "Cafe Manet," Grooms draws the brilliant first Impressionist,
looking every bit the intellectual gentleman of café society,
in a square format, with a sharply detailed and restless line so
suited to the etching technique. Grooms's very next print "Matisse" was
larger-scale, with the sonorous deep black shadows of lithographic
ink showing the white-bearded artist sketching a voluptuous nude
model in a darkened studio. Following this, Grooms created "Corot." a
soft-ground etching with applied color monoprinting. It's a casual
close-up of the artist as a jaunty out-of-doors type in a driving
cap, its application of color done with a fluidity of brushstroke
that reveals the hand of an accomplished painter. (left: South
Sea Sonata , 1992, 3D color lithograph, 20 3/8 x 21 3/4 x 11
3/8 inches)
In this portrait of the artist, a five-color woodcut, Grooms has even further exaggerated the tall thin figures for which sculptor Alberto Giacometti is so well-known. One of the largest prints Grooms has ever done, this was printed on handmade Japanese paper by printers Will Foo and John Stemmer at Experimental Workshop in San Francisco.
Vincent
Van Gogh with his "Sunflowers" -- the best-seller that
came 100 years too late. Grooms did this five color lithograph after
the Van Gogh masterpiece had been auctioned for a very big figure
in 1988.
In "Noa Noa" Grooms depicts Paul Gauguin as a full-fledged resident of the South Seas in an eight color woodcut reminiscent in style to the neo-primitive prints Gauguin developed there.
"To the Lighthouse," a masterful etching with aquatint, created with master printer Aldo Crommelynck in New York, Grooms shows us Edward Hopper painting in the out-of-doors and looking over his own shoulder as critic. By using himself as a model for both figures, Grooms suggests to us that he, like most artists, understands the two roles all too well. (right: To the Lighthouse , 1997, color etching with soft ground and aquatine, 22 x 30 inches)
This has got to be one of the most complicated print multiples ever created. "Katherine, Marcel and the Bride" was produced in 130 colors using three-dimensional silkscreens by Steve Anderson and four assistants. It is based on a large Grooms painting (now in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) from 1984 of the same subject. Here is Katherine Dreier, early American modern art patron, seated with artist Marcel Duchamp in her Connecticut home, contemplating one of the pioneer conceptual artist's masterpieces "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even," a mixed media work done on two large pieces of glass.
Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work , is a traveling exhibition organized by the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, to accompany the publication of Red Grooms: The Graphic Work , by Walter G. Knestrick, Abrams Books, 2001. All works © Red Grooms, from the collection of Walter G. Knestrick. Essays courtesy of The Tennessee State Museum.