Red Grooms

For over fifty years, American artist Red Grooms (born 1937) has used his brush to capture the great panorama of life. And for over fifty years people have delighted in his luscious, loud, laughing depictions that so uniquely celebrate the famous and the anonymous, the meaningful and the absurd, the high and the low, of twentieth-century America.



Red Grooms, Cedar Bar, 1986. Colored pencil and crayon on five sheets in artist’s wood frame. Yale University Art Gallery, Charles B. Benenson, b.a. 1933, Collection

Executed in colored pencil and watercolor on five large sheets of paper, Cedar Bar depicts the legendary members of the New York School as they may have looked during the hey-day of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that intensely creative postwar period, the Cedar Tavern—a hole-in-the-wall bar located at 24 University Place in New York City—became the preferred gathering spot of this group of artists and beat writers to drink and talk about art and politics deep into the night. The group liked the bar for its cheap booze and absence of tourists. Demolished in 1963, the Cedar Tavern has come down in history as something of a cult locale—an almost mythical place where, reputedly, drunken brawls were as common as stimulating dialogue.


The other two paintings  feature as their subject Pablo Picasso:

Red Grooms, Picasso Goes to Heaven, 1973. Acrylic and charcoal on paper laid down on canvases with wood extensions. Yale University Art Gallery, Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, Collection

In 1973 the death of Pablo Picasso inspired Red Grooms to paint this eulogy to the great twentieth-century master. Dominating the lower center of the composition, dressed only in checkered boxer shorts, a jolly Picasso prepares to swing himself heavenward, where other prominent art-world figures wait to greet him. This is Grooms’s jubilant Technicolor vision of how Picasso’s heaven might appear to him after a long life lived to its fullest.



Studio at the Rue des Grands-Augustins
1990-96
Acrylic on canvas in six parts with wood frame

Moved by the grave socio-political conflicts of the early 1990s—from the Gulf War in Iraq and Kuwait to the human-rights atrocities playing out in Bosnia and Somalia—Red Grooms was inspired to paint this monumental work. It depicts Pablo Picasso hard at work in his studio in May 1937 on his great masterpiece Guernica—a gruesome yet triumphant refutation of the unconscionable violence wrought by the Nazis that April upon the innocent victims of the small Spanish village. By creating this tribute to Picasso, Grooms was working through his own grief over the abuses of power and greed continuing to play out throughout the world, then over fifty years later.

Hudson River Museum Presents Red Grooms'  Lincoln on the Hudson and The Blue and The Gray

The Civil War, America’s story, is told by Red Grooms, who for 50 years has brought city and country life to sculpture and canvas.

In two exhibitions, Lincoln on the Hudson and The Blue and The Gray, Grooms creates the world of 1860s America and its parade of personalities who fought the Civil War, a war now 150 years old that continues to hold our thoughts and feelings in books, movies, and music. It percolates, even today, through our nation’s politics.

Lincoln on the Hudson
Red Grooms has filled the galleries of the Hudson River Museum with Lincoln on the Hudson, a larger-than-life, walk-through scene of the historic appearance of President-elect Lincoln in Westchester County’s village of Peekskill on the banks of the Hudson.

Grooms is famed for creating environments in which colorful sculptures of people navigate scenes filled with details that make us smile and want to walk through a Grooms’ world. “I’m so excited to be showing The Blue and The Gray at the Hudson River Museum, said Red Grooms. “And as soon as I heard the story of Lincoln’s train stopping in Peekskill, the idea for Lincoln on the Hudson hit me in a flash. I saw the whole thing in the Museum’s 30-foot-tall main gallery. That doesn’t always happen to me.”

The artist created a “Lincoln” work that fills 775 square feet of the Museum’s gallery space and stands 17 feet high — a world constructed from foam core, canvas, and bright paint. Lincoln stands at the back of the train that crossed the country from Midwest to east to take him to his 1861 inauguration and is greeted by cheering villagers, mounted soldiers (the Civil War is about to begin), a drummer boy, and a brass band. He thanks New Yorkers for their “kind greeting” and says, . . . I will say in a single sentence, in regard to the difficulties that lie before me and our beloved country, that if I can only be as generously and unanimously sustained as the demonstrations I have witnessed indicate I shall be, I shall not fail. . .

A happy moment in time, it is underscored with concern that Lincoln expresses. Grooms crowns Lincoln with a very tall stovepipe hat, branding him the country’s leader and its hope.

The Blue and The Gray
Forty-six paintings record, unforgettably, four years of history.

Red Grooms has been painting the Civil War for over 20 years. Growing up in the South, close to the battlefields of the epic struggle, he turned to its battles and key players to paint large and small-scale works for the exhibition The Blue and The Gray. In oil and graphite, on sliced logs and wood, he records the faces of steely-eyed generals, femme fatale spies, crusading abolitionists, and teen aged African American soldiers. Each year Grooms adds another face and another perspective to The Blue and The Gray. In 2016 using paper much like the cloth squares of a quilt, Grooms has assembled a monumental drawing of Sojourner Truth, the great female Black activist who joins a panoply that includes General George Custer, standing tall with the attitude for which he is famous, and Grooms’ triptych of Robert E. Lee that shows the embattled general growing grimmer as the flag behind him changes from Confederate red to Union blue.

Laura Vookles, Chair of the Museum’s Curatorial Department said, “One thing people may not know about Red Grooms, when they look at his whimsical art, is how devoted he is to the real. For the Museum’s Bookstore, he filled sketchbooks with drawings of the Pierpont Morgan Library and Mendoza’s used book shop. The same holds true for the Civil War. When his subject is the past, he seeks out historical photographs that bring those personalities and scenes to life for him.”

The Blue and The Gray is based on an exhibition organized by the Tennessee State Museum. Lincoln on the Hudson was organized by the Hudson River Museum.

Red Grooms
Long linked to the Hudson River Museum by The Bookstore, 1979, a “walk-through” environment, Red Grooms, in the 1950s, first joined New York City’s cultural scene to make films and participate in “happenings,” both involving the creation of artistic stage sets. From The City of Chicago, 1967 and Ruckus Mountain, 1975, he has evolved large-scale artworks into complex environments, inviting audience participation. All of his environmental installations evoke a feeling of place, which he achieves by researching primary sources and sketches on the spot.