Memories are often caricatures, with all the exaggerations, omissions, and inventions of the past as we wish it had been. The novelist Isabel Allende has gone so far as to simply equate memory to a self-interested fiction, carefully selected from the best and worst of what has become of any given lifetime. These are useful frames of reference for the collection of large scale works and sketches by Red Grooms, now on exhibition at Yale, through March 30, 2014. artes fine arts magazine

Cedar Bar was a recognizable memorial from the start. In 1986, the year that Grooms penciled and crayoned the work into existence, nearly half of those pictured—including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko—were dead. Today, only the writer Dore Ashton, and Red Grooms himself, who appears twice as the bi-locating barkeep, survive.

The subject interested Grooms enough that in the same year he created a three dimensional model of the scene from a different perspective—now at the Princeton University Art Museum—for a full scale installation which was never constructed. A year later, he made a lithograph based on the model. Each version presented an incremental obituary for a lost world, portrayed in a frieze of cartoons. That includes the bar itself which, in the form all of these habitués knew it, had been demolished more than twenty years before the mural size drawing was made.

The detailed remembrance of this place suggests that a verifiable reality lies beneath the commedia dell’arte riot of figures which it cannot entirely contain. Each of the four pyramids of bottles against the far wall rearrange the same identifiable brands of liquor, and every glass in the place is a set piece of illusion. The framed prints in the background of paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs and John James Audubon are the final irony of realism in pictorial counterpoint to the abstract tradition revealed only in the splatters of color on Pollock’s shoes and de Kooning’s pants. A brief note of continuity is provided in the congruence between Audubon’s rendering of two hawks picking at a duck’s corpse and the brawling pair on the barroom floor, the history of art as one long record of fury.

Did any of this actually happen in what was this real location? Whatever Grooms wants this particular past to be is all of his devising. If we have no memory of our own to correct what he provides, then his are at least as good as any. The only alternative I could offer from my own experience was having known Harold Rosenberg, the slightly off center pillar of the piece in fedora and green overcoat. He reads as a giant, and while the bulk of him is exaggerated, it is true to the weight of his mind and the assertiveness of his presence in the rooms where I last saw him. I am willing, then, to trade my memory for Grooms’, or, more accurately, embellish mine with his. And in those other cases of people whom I never met, as for example, Ruth Sligman, the woman applying lipstick who was Jackson Pollock’s lover and survived the car crash that killed him – her rendering by Grooms posed like a Reginald Marsh sexpot, will now be my choice of record over against any period photograph. And I am endlessly grateful for the tiny ghosts of cigarette smoke, drifting like comic strip balloons left blank for anyone to fill with what should have been said in that loud dive.

Studio at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, painted by Grooms from 1990–96 (below) is a very different fantasy of memory. At the center of it is Picasso’s Guernica of 1937, which has been decked out as if it were a commentary on the spill of cubism within a parallel universe. For Grooms, the comic grotesque is the way both to the horror confronted by the thing made and the domestic routines of its making. With all the unexpected alterations and shifting within the iconic painting, the confusion over what is and isn’t an accurate rendering (was there a mechanical horse in the original?) turns the imperfect recall of the piece into a subject. The emphatic glory of black and white and gray emerges within an ordinary world of color and tea kettles and pets, and Grooms’ despair of evoking the masterwork is countered by celebrating the absurdity of his attempt.

One other opera buffa is essayed in Picasso Goes to Heaven (1973), below right, where the painter who is its subject, Falstaffian in his checkered underwear, can-cans in brazen and furious delight beneath an unfinished paradise of artists which arches above him like a carnival of temptations to his demented saint. As he does in all his work, Grooms makes pictures of noise like no one else, and that raucous constant is the measure of what he must call a life worth remembering.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Red Grooms: Larger than Life

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