On the goofy side of greatness
“A cross between PT Barnum and Marcel Duchamp,” someone called Red Grooms. The mind stoops defensively into boggling mode , but then remembers that surrealism was a circus, after all, and maybe Grooms even had another showman in mind, Dali, when he painted “Deli”.
“Red” is a nickname, something to do with his hair colour, though he uses it a lot in his pictures too. His real name is Charles Rogers Grooms.
“Deli” is a “3-D lithograph”, it says here. I don’t know about that, but for sure it’s an aromatic cut-out pastiche of someplace in the hungry imagination called Red & Bud’s Midtown Deli, all New York noise and real-life character actors. That’s Grooms bussing tables and not looking too happy about it.
Born in Nashville in 1937, Grooms schooled at the Art Institute of Chicago and Peabody College before switching to the New School for Social Research, which sounds awful, but then he spent the summer of 1957 tutoring with the formidable Hans Hofmann in sunny Provincetown.
He got beat and into happenings and, with experimental animator Yvonne Anderson, groovy filmmaking. The occasional star of their flicks was an unruly upstart he concocted called “Ruckus”. By the ’60s Grooms had started making his “sculpto-pictoramas” and variations on an installation theme.
After a cityscape amalgam called “Ruckus Manhattan” in 1975 allegedly proved to be the turning point in his career, Grooms dedicated himself to “New York Stories”, a series of tableau prints full of humour and human nature.
He’s also been hailed as a maverick and dismissed as a clown. The latter is easier to see but too easy to accept. “Elvis”, from 1987, is a bit of a stretch even for an icon who begs for caricature, but his 1995 “The Bus” was 22 feet long piece and you could get on board as the driver’s gaze followed you and walk through it, jostling among the passengers.
And “Jackson in Action” is quite simply great. Apparently he painted Salvador Dali too, as well as “Deli”, but I haven’t been able to find it on the Web.
Alas, word of Grooms’ buffoonery precedes him. One gallery hosting a recent show empashised that it was “fun for families”. There is something of the art-as-cereal-box-prize aspect to Red’s work, but I don’t think it needs playing up.
And there’s a website flogging copies of “Deli” that feels obliged to prattle on about “eight colours from 14 plates in an edition of 50, plus proofs, on four sheets of white Rives BFK paper that have been cut, folded, assembled and mounted in a plexiglas cover that measures 29-3/8 x 28 x 9-3/4″.
That bang was my head hitting the tabletop.
It’s ridiculous to dismiss Red Grooms as a “Clown”, or that his body of work is “for families”. Look closely at the detailed work. They are caricatures of modern life and people. More often then not he illustrates the ugliness that exists today in our world. I went toRed Grooms exhibits as a child, adolescent,and as an adult. Most of the scenes dipicted are not for children. You can see he has been influenced by both Dali and Picasso; so what is that a bad thing? If you have not seen his works in person(the almost to scale Bus, Subway car, the sculptures of the “Ruckus in Manhattan” series you cannot really appreciate or speak on it.
S.
Point well taken, Scott, thanks. I’d very much love to see one of his shows.