LOFT STORY

”Pop art’s origins are in Britain, specifically with Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and the Independent Group. Unlike their American counter-parts, these Brit pop artists didn’t have a critical figure like a Steinberg or Greenberg to co-opt or codify them. The work when taken together very much reflects the anarchic spirit of youth culture, and the rock and roll of the time. Robert Hughes, in his American Visions series, says that the difference between British and American pop art was that the British were responding to the American popular culture being piped over the sea as a distant oasis, full of possibilities and seperate from the stodgy, conformist society they lived in; whereas the Americans were making Pop art out of nausea or narciscism, as a reaction to Fifth Avenue.” ( Astromen )

Red Grooms lost his loft but not until he had preserved the studio and all his friends in a scale model. Red Groom ( 1936- ) is an expressionist painter with Pop tendencies, a talented eclectic, and an unabashed sentimentalist. Months before he was evicted from his Manhattan loft studio, he was determined to memorialize it. The luncheonette on the ground floor of his building burned down in the summer of 1964 and he knew his days in the loft were numbered. He then started building a scale replica of the place.

The model, appropriately titled ”Loft on 26th Street”, measures 30 feet by 35 feet by 70 inches and is made of plywood, cardboard, and styrofoam, all coated with acrylic paint. The cardboard cutouts are friends of Grooms who is on the far right and his wife Mimi leaning on a chair in the center. Some of the portraits took fourteen hours to paint. Grooms had previously exercised the same painstaking care and comic touch in 1963 when he made a three dimensional collage of the famous banquet Picasso staged for Henri Rousseau.

He has never been able to explain what inspired him to get started on stick-out constructions, claiming it may have been a natural progression from early textural experiments with cardboard on canvas and then building sets for the burgeoning ”happenings” scene and movies. Grooms at one time also produced avant-garde motion pictures under the imprimateur of ”Ruckus Films”

”When Red Grooms (b. 1937) went on his honeymoon in Italy with wife and collaborator Mimi Gross, they rented a circus caravan and traveled, giving puppet shows to pay their way. The horse that pulled the wagon was named Ruckus. Grooms’s best-known “environment” is called Ruckus, Manhattan: A Sculptural Novel. This work filled a 6,400-square foot building in New York, and was attended by 150,000 people. His assemblage Chicago was created before Ruckus, Manhattan and in .the same general style. Grooms’s sculptural assemblages are whimsical, with buildings deliberately distorted. It has often been called Disneyesque. For a time he was not taken seriously by the art world because of his bizarre sense of humor. He was a pioneer in the field of Happenings. His mature work-while it is always collaborative, with himself as the director of a crew of (sometimes) 20 people-seems like a permanent collection of Happenings. He began as an artist just as pure Abstract Expressionism was phasing out, and perhaps this accounts for the success of his reality-based assemblages.”

Red Grooms’ art occupied the unstable terrain between abstract expressionism and pop art. In this sense he embodies contradiction: representation, narrative, history, observation, social comment, all traditional concepts which combine by an array of formal strategies that bind him to the abstract painters of the New York School. Grooms’s subjects link him to the social realist tradition in the witty and irreverent mode of a Reginald Marsh. But in his way of making a painting, or a sculpture, he deals with color, line, and space like an Abstract Expressionist. Every element of the design is carried out to the edge, foreground and background all bound together into a unit that doesn’t elevate or demote either. This is representational painting to be sure, yet figure-ground are fused, and like Pollock’s drips, effects are equable everywhere in the canvas as lines and colors command attention right up to the canvas edge.

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''Grooms was an alert to the contrasts that you find on the streets of American cities. It's a combination of exuberant and vibrant life with gritty technology and bizarre architecture. ''