“The Human Comedy: Portraits by Red Grooms”
L.P. Streitfeld
With the full participation
of the artist, curator Isabelle Dervaux has assembled the first exhibition of
Red Grooms portraits in an adventurous show at the Katonah Museum of Art that
has to be experienced to be believed – which explains the word of mouth
appeal.
Ranging from early intimate sketches of family and friends to large cultural
figures dressed in bold and adventurous forms, these theater pieces play with
perception through a storyteller’s shifting of scale, backdrop and material.
In this context, cartoons skewering icons such as Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley,
Rauschenberg and Dali are target practice for an ambitious goal — collapsing
boundaries between high and low art.
The playful staging of the 65 works on view in “The Human Comedy,”
has a “retrospective in the making” quality at a time when the script
for celebrity is being rewritten. Just as “Chicago” interchanges naturalistic
realism with the theatrical in a satirical examination of the interdependence
between entertainment, celebrity and the media, Red Grooms skewers his subjects
by articulating their signature style into transparent scenarios of self-created
mythology. A prime example is “Morris Louis, the Pouring,” a colored
pencil rendering of a painting created in the context of a theater in which influential
critic Clement Greenberg directs the technique, as he was oft accused, of his
discovery.
The artist’s injection of satirical wit into innovative forms pushed the
art of portraiture into the foreground when figurative painting was eclipsed
by abstraction and the growing recognition of photography as an art form. He
moved the painted figure off the canvas into new dramatic territory with experiments
ranging from large multi-media constructions to paper doll cutouts (“Gertrude
1975” and “Gertrude 2D , 1975”) and a telephone book ink portrait
of Franz Klein.
Fascinated by theater as a child, the artist pioneered the collaborative multimedia
“happening” in 1960’s and created scenarios for underground films.
Like good drama, his art satirizes the tension between image and reality. For
example, Mae West appears in glitzy gown before a severe New England church while
his bored idol Pablo Picasso bides his time smoking in a discarded raincoat.
Dervaux’s excellent choices paint a compelling portrait of a gleeful, yet
defiant Red Grooms claiming his own larger than life stature in the world of
art and culture. While he hasn’t received the accolades or public recognition
reserved for artists that spearheaded movements, “The Human Comedy”
offers ample proof that this maverick can paint right through and around his
fellow icons, taking up and subsequently dropping their causes in an evolutionary
style of social commentary all his own.
