Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College Publications, Special Books, pamphlets, catalogues, and scrapbooks Collections, Digitized Books 2010 Old Masters and Modern Muses: Red Grooms's Portraits of Artists, 1957-2009 Bryn Mawr College Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmc_books Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Bryn Mawr College, "Old Masters and Modern Muses: Red Grooms's Portraits of Artists, 1957-2009" (2010). Books, pamphlets, catalogues, and scrapbooks. 17. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmc_books/17 This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmc_books/17 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Old Masters and Modern Muses Red Grooms’s Portraits of Artists, 1957–2009 BRYN MAWR COLLEGE Old Masters and Modern Muses Red Grooms’s Portraits of Artists, 1957–2009 March 25–June 5, 2010 BRYN MAWR COLLEGE Class of 1912 Rare Book Room, Canaday Library Foreword and Acknowledgements Elliott Shore Introduction Emily Croll Interview with the Artist Michèle C. Cone Film Essay Johanna Gosse Foreword and Acknowledgements “ 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, sentimental love, my way of being in the world—nostalgia is a I want to thank Red and Lysiane Luoung Grooms for the opportunity to word that for historians can mean the antithesis of history, the thinning out present these works to the Bryn Mawr College community and for their of complication, the normalizing of experience, the yearning for a golden gift to the College of three works in the show: Self Portrait with Litho age that never really was. In getting to know Red, I have come to see that Pencil; Five Futurists print; and my favorite, George Grosz in Berlin. I want his idea of nostalgia is both simpler and richer than what one encounters also to express my gratitude to Michèle C. Cone, class of 1951, for introducing This exhibition and publication have been made possible through generous funding from in academia. As an historian, I discovered with Red a shared interest in the Red and Lysiane to the College, for generating the idea of the exhibition, the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library and Margery Peterson Lee. past, in the history of the places we inhabit and of the people who came and for her interview with him in this catalogue. The Board of the Friends before us. Red imagines himself in those worlds and can put himself in of the Bryn Mawr College Library, chaired by Teresa Wallace, class of 1979, A gift in honor of María Dolores Dávila Rudolph has made possible them through his art. He thinks of the past as continuous with the present; has been a staunch supporter of this exhibition, especially Board member the mounting of the exhibition in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room. he understands the past as something that is alive and plastic, that has Margery Peterson Lee, class of 1951. A lovely gift to the College, in honor of © 2010 by Bryn Mawr College. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted space for him in it, and that helps to shape him and us. María Dolores Dávila Rudolph, class of 1981, makes possible the mounting in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of the publisher. of this show in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room. Emily Croll, Curator For Red, nostalgia is the capacity to explore the past from the point of view and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts, has done outstanding work in of the present, a way to show his love for those who came before, thus mak- Editor Jean Lacovara conceiving and curating this exhibition and provided a fine introduction in ing it a space for him to be in the world, and, in turn, for us to join him in Designer Barbara Metzger this volume. The excellent work of Johanna Gosse, a graduate student in that space. It is a less encumbered way to think about nostalgia, stripped of Printed by CRW Graphics the History of Art who served as curatorial assistant for the exhibition and the connotations of idealization, a golden age, melancholia, or of pining for Exhibition Design Steve and Peggy Zablotny authored the essay on Grooms’s films, was funded by the Graduate Group home, which are some of the ways that nostalgia has been understood by in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art. We also thank the following All artwork reproduced in this volume is © 2010 by Red Grooms, Inc. historians. Red’s understanding of this term is also more profound. He gets lenders to the exhibition: Red and Lysiane Grooms; Saskia Grooms; the at memory in ways that the most recent findings in neuroscience confirm. The interview with the artist is © 2010 by Red Grooms and Lysiane Luoung Grooms. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Shark’s Ink; and the We all remember—or recollect—the past for the purposes of the present, for Marlborough Gallery. To Juliet Goodfriend, class of 1963, President of our brains put the past into a shape that makes sense for us today. Red turns ISBN 978-0-615-34826-1 the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, we extend our warmest gratitude for her these recollections into a creative act, one that asks us to think again, to see collaboration with us and to MM Serra, executive director of the Film- again, to put ourselves into a deeper and more powerful place. He invites Makers’ Cooperative, for making the films available. us into a space at once playful and thoughtful, meditative and speculative, that not only draws us a place to be, but makes room in the present for the Elliott Shore past. He takes history seriously by crafting images of real people and events, Director of Libraries and Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College Cover illustration: Red Grooms, Nighthawks Revisited, 1980, colored pencil on paper, 44 x 74 1/2 in., collection of Lysiane Luoung Grooms and the artist seeing and caring for them anew. In so doing, he re-collects the past for understanding the present. A rare and lovely gift he shares with us all. Introduction Bryn Mawr College’s exhibition Old Masters and Modern Muses: Red A subject that has continually engaged Grooms throughout the course of his Grooms is fascinated not only with the image of the artist and his art, but also uses them in order to lower the subject through ridicule. The clown, by Grooms’s Portraits of Artists, 1957-2009 is the first exploration of an im- long and vibrant career is the image and persona of the artist. The selection with the artist’s milieu. This milieu sometimes serves as a venue for artistic contrast, underlines the same imperfections as a way of raising the audi- portant theme within the artist’s oeuvre. As the esteemed art critic and of works for Bryn Mawr’s exhibition includes artist portraits from each of creation, as in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, which functioned in the 1910s ence in its own esteem.”6 Certainly this is the case with most of Grooms’s philosopher Arthur Danto has noted, “A lot of Grooms’s work is about the five decades of Grooms’s career, beginning with the 1957 drawing and as a nightclub, avant-garde art space, and political forum. Often the artistic portraits of artists, as for example in Jackson in Action, where Grooms’s art; he has an immense and an affectionate knowledge of art history, and linocut print, Five Futurists, which Grooms has acknowledged as marking milieu is more of a social sphere, crowded with the revelry of artists, as in the portrayal of Pollock with five right arms provides a humorous commentary he likes to use his art to make statements about its history and his own “the beginning of my infatuation with the likeness and work of other artists.”2 Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village and Les Deux Magots in Paris. Danto on the artist’s working method, while in no way denigrating his creative relationship to it.”1 This exhibition brings together more than thirty of During subsequent years, as Grooms continued to examine the images and described Grooms’s depictions of the Cedar Bar—the gathering place of the force or iconic stature. In his portraits of artists Grooms does not mock his Grooms’s portraits of artists. In these works Grooms pays homage to artists work of other artists, his explorations ranged from artists of the nineteenth abstract expressionists in the 1950s—as “an act of piety and a confession of subjects, rather, he humorously reimagines them in order to share with his ranging from Titian to Pollock, interpreting their physical features and their century, whom he depicted in a series of prints in 1976, to twentieth-century loyalty to the sources of his artistic being.”3 Regarding his group portrait of art- audience his admiration and affection for their artistic gifts. artwork through mimesis and humor, while also exploring how these artists masters, including the abstract expressionists, whose portraits he created in ists and intellectuals at Les Deux Magots, Grooms explained that the print “is 4 The artists whom Grooms depicts are among the masters who have helped have served as masters and muses for his own creative development. the 1980s and 1990s.