Red Grooms: Books

Best known for his extravagant life-sized artworks of stores, subways, and city scenes, Red Grooms populates these environments with offbeat, spirited, easily identifiable characters who strike a humorous chord. Intertwining sculpture with painting, his work transcends both traditional portraiture and caricature.
This is the first major book on Red Grooms's work published since 1984 and includes many drawings, personal photographs, and prints that have never been seen or published. Many of his famed sculpto-pictoramas appear in full color and some in gatefolds, such as Moby Dick Meets the NYPL, Tennessee Carousel, and The Marathon. (summary provided by the publisher)

"Even a quick glance through the pages of Red Grooms: The Graphic Work makes one thing perfectly clear: Red Grooms is an original. And this comprehensive collection of his graphic work from 1956 to 1999 offers a dazzling display of Grooms's unique mastery of an array of printmaking techniques. From delicate, soft-ground etchings to an over six-foot tall woodblock print to spray-painted stencils, Red Grooms's artistry reflects his antic humor, imaginative vision, and often raucous view of an extensive range of subjects." "Walter Knestrick, a boyhood classmate of Grooms who has collected the artist's prints over the years, introduces the reader to Red Grooms and tells of his fifty-year friendship with the artist from their early artistic experiments in Nashville to their collaboration on this superb assembly of Red Grooms's graphic work."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Red Grooms is a cross between Marcel Duchamp and P. T. Barnum. Working in a brash, freewheeling style, Grooms has explored the raucous spectacle of life around him since his career began in the 1950s. This catalogue, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Palmer Museum of Art, brings together forty of his works to demonstrate that even his most whimsical creations have serious implications. Many of the mixed-media constructions in Red Grooms and the Heroism of Modern Life reflect upon America's love affair with sports, business, and celebrity. The mixture of parody and homage in Grooms's portraits of such stars as Pablo Picasso and Fats Domino charges all his depictions of American popular culture, from bulky football players and haggard shoppers to a brightly colored Ferris wheel. In her essay for this catalogue, Joyce Henri Robinson contends that Grooms should be should be considered a contemporary counterpart to Charles Baudelaire's Parisian flaneur. Much like this famed character, she observes, Grooms approaches the world around him as a spectacle filled with novel forms of heroism. In this regard, the key work in the catalogue is an installation centered upon a full-scale version of a New York City bus. Grooms's Bus tempers revelation of the gritty realities of urban life with humor and flashes of poetry.

"The bulk of this thick, oversize paperback accompanying Grooms's retrospective is a visual catalog of the exhibition, consisting of full-page, mostly color, illustrations of each work. It also surveys the career of this whimsical contemporary social satirist, in four essays introducing the illustrations. Stein's study of Grooms's early years and her general essay rely heavily on secondary sources but contain much useful information, as do John Ashbery's short piece and Janet K. Cutler's article on Grooms's films. A final "Chronological Bibliography and Exhibition List" by Jennifer Way is scholarly, comprehensive, and clearly organized. Recommended for general as well as art libraries." Library Journal Review, Barbara Tannenbaum 1986

Contents Include: ntroduction; 1. From Tennessee to Manhattan; 2. On the Road with Red and Mimi; 3. Coast to Coast: 26th Street to Beverly Hills; 4. Moving On; 5. Breakthrough; 6. Ruckus and More Ruckus; 7. Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Beyond; Epilogue: Shoot-out; chronology, exhibitions, public collections, bibliography, index with 301color and b&w illustrations. "'Ruckus' is the perfect word to describe the high-spirited chaos of Red Grooms's crazy world, where real life and fantasy blend into a whol-hearted celebration. That irrepressibly playful spirit animates this wonderfully illustrated book, bringing the work to life both for Groom's legions of enthustic fans and for those who still look forward to discovering him" (from the front flap).

What was your first artwork to receive recognition? What materials do you use, and how did they come into your practice? What advice would you give a young artist just starting out? Joe Fig asked a wide range of celebrated artists these and many other questions during the illuminating studio visits documented inInside the Artist's Studio--the follow-up to his acclaimed 2009 book,Inside the Painter's Studio. In this remarkable collection, twenty-four painters, video and mixed-media artists, sculptors, and photographers reveal highly idiosyncratic production tools and techniques, as well as quotidian habits and strategies for getting work done: the music they listen to; the hours they keep; and the relationships with gallerists and curators, friends, family, and fellow artists that sustain them outside the studio.

After World War II, New York became the laboratory for the Western world's avant-garde art movements, a prominent role it maintained for decades. Generations of New York artists have left their mark on the development of contemporary art in the context of influential art movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Super Realism, Minimalism, Land Art, Body Art, and Conceptual Art. This show and catalog, published in association with a major exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum of Monte Carlo, is the most comprehensive exploration of this topic. New York, New York encompasses critical research into the fields of architecture, cinema, photography, music, performance art and video, conveying the cultural dynamics that have characterized life in this metropolis since the 1940's. Lisa Dennison and Germano Celant have selected the artists and works that best depict the pivotal role played by New York artists, and they have illuminated the complex cultural environment in which they worked.