Red Grooms paints artists, at Bryn Mawr

"I have nostalgia; I have a sentimental love for the artists I portrayed. Very early on, my involvement in art became my way of being in the world."
"“Red Grooms, 2009.

Nostalgia is the theme of "Old Masters and Modern Muses: Red Grooms's Portraits of Artists, 1957-2009," currently on view at Bryn Mawr College. "For Red, nostalgia is the capacity to explore the past from the point of view of the present," explains Elliott Shore, director of libraries, in the full-color catalogue that accompanies the show.

Grooms was born in Nashville in 1937 as Charles Rogers Grooms. He began painting in high school and went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to his hometown to attend Peabody College. By the summer of 1957 he was in Provincetown, taking a course with Hans Hofmann, whom he considered a great modern painter.

Grooms also began making short films. In the late '50s, he invented what he called "sculpto-pictoramas," the mixed media installations that would become his signature craft.

Philadelphia connections

Grooms is particularly beloved in Philadelphia since his Philadelphia Cornucopia was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art for the city's Tricentennial in 1982 and later at 30th Street Station. A major retrospective of Grooms's work also took place in 1985 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, from where it traveled across the country.

The more than 30 works now on display in the Canaday Library's Rare Books Room include papier maché constructions, ink drawings, prints, oils, watercolors and sculpture—some never before seen. It's an intimate show in a spacious room— uncrowded with the legions that attend blockbuster events at big city museums.

Why this venue for a major American artist? Perhaps because Grooms and his wife, Lysiane Luoung, are longtime friends of Michele Cahen Cone, a 1951 Bryn Mawr graduate who specializes in 20th-Century art, and whose interview with Grooms is included in the catalogue. Without the catalogue (a steal at $10), I'd never have understood the pen-and-ink drawing, George Grosz in Berlin, in which the artist Georg Baselitz is shown upside down, signifying Germany's turmoil during the '70s and '80s.

Hopper at the counter

The visitor is free to inspect these enchanting gems leisurely, and up close. And the closer one looks, the more one sees. Each of the portraits is done in the style of the artist being portrayed. For example, Edward Hopper is shown smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee in Grooms's playful but loving homage, Nighthawks Revisited. The red-haired soda jerk behind the counter is Grooms in all of his carrot-topped splendor.

Hopper's famous melancholy painting, which epitomizes the loneliness of metropolitan life, is lightened by Grooms's affectionate sense of humor. Every inch of the canvas (colored pencil on paper) is rich in detail: a Yankees emblem, a man smoking in a window across the street, a city skyline in the distance, a calendar, a strip of flypaper and a few scruffy alley cats.

Pollack with five arms

You'll find everyone who has influenced Grooms, from Rembrandt to Kline, the latter portrayed on a carved telephone book because, as the legend reads, Kline often used the phone book to sketch when he couldn't afford paper. There's a lithograph of Matisse sedately drawing a model in his studio and an etching of Cézanne eating an apple in one of his own still life paintings. Jackson in Action is an inspired three-dimensional lithograph portrait of Jackson Pollack, with five arms furiously painting while his wife, Lee Krasner, watches from the door to his studio.

It's fun to walk around the room and recognize a famous artist in his or her own style. Look for a vibrant Sonia Delauney and a black, white and grey etching of Alberto Giacometti in front of his elongated sculptures. There's a charming sculpture of Grooms's friend, the late photographer Rudy Burckhardt, with his dog.

Painters' hangouts

Grooms was also interested in the artist's milieu, whether in Paris, New York or Zurich. Among the most intriguing works are pictures of artists at the celebrated places where they gathered—The Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village and Les Deux Magots when it was frequented by Parisians Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

It's a pleasure to see an art exhibit that makes you smile, and you'll certainly smile when you see how ingeniously Grooms has rendered Salvador Dali. Don't have a car? Take the Paoli local to Bryn Mawr Station, where you can easily walk to the lovely Bryn Mawr campus.♦


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