Red Grooms and the Heroism of Modern Life

Red Grooms is a cross between Marcel Duchamp and P.T. Barnum. Working in a brash, freewheeling style, Grooms has explored the raucous spectacle of life around him since his career began in the 1950s. This catalogue, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Palmer Museum of Art, brings together 40 of his works to demonstrate that even his most whimsical creations have serious implications. Many of the mixed-media constructions in this catalogue reflect upon America’s love affair with sports, business and celebrity. The mixture of parody and homage in Grooms’ portraits of such stars as Pablo Picasso and Fats Domino charges all his depictions of American popular culture, from bulky football players and haggard shoppers to a brightly coloured Ferris wheel. In her essay for this catalogue, Joyce Henri Robinson contends that Grooms should be considered a contemporary counterpart to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian flaneur. Much like this famed character, she observes, Grooms approaches the world around him as a spectacle filled with novel forms of heroism.