© Red Grooms, Member of Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Artist/Maker Red Grooms (b. 1937)

Seventh Ave between 22nd & 21st St. NYC

1967

Paper collage with watercolor and black ink under plexiglass, screwed to two painted panels

51 1/4 x 180 3/8 in.

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.111

Born Charles Rogers Grooms, the ginger-haired artist Red Grooms is known for his colorful, frenetic, Pop-flavored scenes of modern urban life, a cross between painting and a two-dimensional tableaux. Seventh Ave Between 22nd & 21st St. NYC is a quintessential example of his unique oeuvre. He was given the nickname “Red” by Dominic Falcone of Provincetown’s Sun Gallery while studying at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in the artists’ summer community in Massachusetts. There, he met the experimental animation pioneer Yvonne Andersen, with whom he collaborated on several films, and whose influence is evident in this comic strip-come-to-life: a seven-and-a-half-foot, friezelike procession of vehicles and figures, whose cartoon synesthesia makes the cacophony of the New York City thoroughfare audible. Early in his career, critics grasped the artist’s wild, contagious humor and eccentric individualism. Grooms came out of the exuberant world of “Happenings”—a term coined by artist Allan Kaprow—which were impromptu, audience-involving performance events of the late fifties and sixties that seemed to take literally Harold Rosenberg’s identification of painting as “an arena in which to act.” Grooms set his reputation and gestural style with his own Happenings in 1959–60, and he subsequently extended the expressionism of his sets and participants to his brightly hued paintings and collages. Attempting to recreate the three-dimensional, walk-in experience of his loft, he painted what he called “stick-outs,” which stand independently like stage flats.4 A New York Times critic called Grooms’s meld of vernacular devices and Gotham street subjects a “movement of one man that is open to everyone.” He added that while maturing simultaneously with Pop Art, Grooms’s work had much in common with Abstract Expressionism while epitomizing the life-enhancing process of making art. In Seventh Avenue, which should be read as a continuous frieze, the artist’s brash stereotypes in the multi-racial urban bustle follow the tradition of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier, both canny commentators on class collisions in modern cities. More precisely, Grooms recalls the eighteenth-century British artist William Rowlandson, whose bawdy lampoons send up human foibles. Strains of vaudeville and gag jokes, and the honky-tonk of Grooms’s hometown, Nashville, run through Seventh Avenue as well. Ever attuned to human goofiness, he exaggerates dress and behavior to exploit their humor: for example, the Li’l Abner-like man at the left wears clown-like shoes, while standing in front of a shoe repair shop. Punctuating the human parade are the Pop Art cars and commercial signs, which add to the action and metropolitan hum. Grooms, who is also a filmmaker, claims among his sources Walt Disney, the pioneer of film animation, and Robert Wilson, the experimental theater director and creator of grandiose, immersive productions.6 “I like to make sort of documentaries,” Grooms told a reviewer from Time magazine in 1965. “Something you can see as it happens—what people wear and do.” After arriving in New York in 1956, Grooms lived for fifteen years in the neighborhood of Seventh Avenue, in the Flatiron and Chelsea districts. Always active on the fringes of downtown avant-garde circles, he is recognized as a pioneer of large, site-specific sculpture and installation art, which he calls “sculpto-pictoramas.” Seventh Avenue dates from the same year as his first large installation, The City of Chicago (1967), which led to his mixed media masterpiece Ruckus Manhattan (1976). A raucous, walk-in, 3-D cartoon fantasy made of painted papier-mâché, vinyl, and fiberglass, Ruckus Manhattan occupies over ten thousand square feet. To research for this sculpture celebrating the gritty glamour and chaotic beauty of the borough, Red and his then-wife, artist Mimi Gross, hiked and rode through Manhattan, sketching and taking photographs. Seventh Avenue reveals the importance of drawing to his oeuvre and shows Grooms as a master draftsman with an expressionist bent.

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