Grooms Remains a Master of Earlier, Grittier Times

“Even when I was a young guy, people thought I was an old man,” reflects artist Red Grooms. “My work looked folky and my name was peculiar. I sort of liked it, actually. I don’t think it’s so funny now.”

Grooms is 64 and the carrot-colored hair that inspired his moniker has turned gray. (His parents named him Charles.) But then, for an artist who was already looking backward well before he had acquired much of a past, aging has been almost an afterthought, a matter of catching up with his reputation.

Known for freezing urban life into boisterous, gleefully vulgar sculptures, prints and paintings, Grooms always has been conscious that capturing the present can be an exercise in nostalgia. Sometimes, as in the rollicking “Ruckus Manhattan” (1975), he records the minutia of a single moment even as it’s disappearing. Elsewhere, he contents himself with reminiscing or tapping our collective fantasies of silent-movie Hollywood, of the Wild West, of conversations between the pioneers of modern art.

Grooms’ accessibility and impious humor have been an effective antidote to the artsy pretensions of his peers and have made his work enormously popular. He has always steered clear of trendy “isms,” transcended the ebb and flow of fashion and single-mindedly stuck to his idiosyncratic vision: packed, vibrant scenes full of heavy comic-book lines and thick-limbed people.

At times, his work has floated so far from the center of what’s timely that the art-world radar has failed to pick it up entirely. Yet Grooms has persevered, and now, in a climate that looks and feels completely different from the late 1950s when he started, he is still current.

A new show at the National Academy of Design, “Red Grooms: Selections From the Graphic Work,” spans more than 40 years and highlights his undiminished mastery of a wide array of print-making techniques.

Speaking with a Nashville drawl and self-effacing humor, Grooms cheerfully describes his mix of pride and disappointment with his continuing outsider status, broken only briefly in the 1980s, when a cohort of hot, young neo-Expressionists adopted him as a forerunner. “Occasionally you do see yourself way on the outside, almost to the point where nobody’s talking to you--they don’t even want to be standing next to you,” he says half-jokingly. “It’s kind of tough. I would have been really happy to be part of a going movement. But it’s a Faustian bargain, to be fashionable. Inevitably, it’s going to turn against you, and then you’re really out.”

Grooms seems constitutionally incapable of splashing contentedly around in the zeitgeist . Though he has lived in New York City on and off since 1957, the current Giulianified city seems to him a bleached and placid place compared to the vividly gritty metropolis he imagines from before his time. Last year, he made a view of the neighborhood near the Hudson River, once famous as Hell’s Kitchen, circa 1940. Looking out the window of his downtown Manhattan studio, he happened to see a white cloud of steam that sent his mind back in time.

“You know, it used to look so good when there was all that pollution,” he muses. “It was so lively. There was something happening in the air. Now they’ve cleaned everything up, and it’s just kind of blah.”

New York has proved an inexhaustible quarry for Grooms’ festive, beguiling and slightly scary imagery. The city reminds him of the grainy and rough traveling circuses of his boyhood and he’s determined to capture that seedy quality.

For “Saskia Down in the Metro,” a 1983 silkscreen in the current show, Grooms escorted his young daughter down into the city’s bowels and endowed her with a fear he says she did not feel. In the center of a subway car jammed with unsavory types, a tiny redhead clutches the silver pole and turns her wide-eyed gaze upon the viewer.

“It’s a pretty scary picture,” Grooms says. “She was commuting on the Eighth Avenue subway to school, and there were these known creeps she would have to pass everyday who always hung out in the same spots like trolls. She thought it was completely funny and nonthreatening, but it’s strange in retrospect that I would place her in such a situation.”

Critics often remark upon the humor in Grooms’ work but rarely mention its darkness. Yet it’s this very ability to temper filth with frivolity (or vice versa) that puts the artist in a league with such other legendary urban chroniclers as Charles Dickens or Tom Wolfe. Like them, Grooms tries to convey, through a poetic analysis of modern manners, relations between sundry members of the urban rabble. His work is not psychological but social--epic even--in its ambition to cut a giant slice of the city and itemize its ingredients. Accordingly, his figures are emblems, instantly recognizable composites rather than sentient individuals.

Like Dickens and Wolfe, Grooms paints urban portraits in pixels of humanity, relying heavily on caricature and stereotype, and the approach has gotten him into trouble. In the 1980s, “Shoot Out,” a sculpture depicting a Hollywood-style battle between cowboys and Indians, was evicted from its location in the courtyard of a Denver condominium because it seemed to perpetuate tired stereotypes about American Indians. Its new home on a traffic island only made it more public and hence more controversial. Finally, the Denver Art Museum adopted the piece, offering it shelter from opprobrium and fumes and a permanent home on its rooftop.

Even when he is depicting a specific person, Grooms’ sense of satire can sometimes backfire. Three years ago, a statue of D.W. Griffith filming Lillian Gish on an errant ice floe became the center of controversy on the campus of Northern Kentucky University, where the piece had been quietly on view for two decades. Black students raised questions about the monumental elevation of Griffith, director of the pro-Klan movie “Birth of a Nation.” Grooms was perceived as a racist, too, for immortalizing him. The artist never denied he was trying to honor Griffith, who was much revered as a director when the sculpture was made (and, notwithstanding his prejudices, still is).

But Grooms also insisted his intention was to lampoon the Hollywood icon and that, in any case, the work is open to a range of interpretation.