Monotype Figurative Paintings

Red Grooms (American, b. 1937). Keystone Kops to the Rescue III. 2006. Triptych color monotype created by the artist with lithographic ink on plexiglass plates, and then hand-colored by the artist. Printed by master printer Bud Shark. Printed on White Rives BFK. A unique impression, signed by the artist in pencil lower right. 3 sheets. Each sheet is 30 x 44 ½ ”. Overall: 30 x 133 ½ ” This has all the wonderful components of a Red Grooms piece, Keystone Kops policemen, Circus, Cactus, Cowboys, Hollywood sign etc. Red Grooms (born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic Falcone (of Provincetown's Sun Gallery) when he was starting out as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown and was studying with Hans Hofmann. Grooms was born in Nashville, Tennessee during the middle of the Great Depression. Red Grooms came of age in the shadow of the Abstract Expressionists. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at Nashville's Peabody College. In 1956, Grooms moved to New York City, to enroll at the New School for Social Research. A year later, Grooms attended a summer session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he met experimental animation pioneer Yvonne Andersen, with whom he collaborated on several short films. Grooms follows in the tradition of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier, who were canny commentators on the human condition. In 1969, Peter Schjeldahl compared Grooms to Marcel Duchamp, because both embodied "a movement of one man that is open to everybody." In the spring of 1958, Grooms, Yvonne Andersen and Lester Johnson each painted twelve-foot by twelve-foot panels, which they erected with telephone poles on a parking lot adjacent an amusement park in Salisbury, MA. Inspired by artist-run spaces such as New York's Hansa Gallery and Phoenix, and Provincetown's Sun Gallery, Grooms and painter Jay Milder opened the City Gallery in Grooms' second-floor loft in the Flatiron District. When Phoenix refused to show Claes Oldenburg, Grooms and Milder dropped out of Phoenix and City Gallery presented Oldenberg's first New York exhibition, as well as that of Jim Dine. Other artists who showed at City Gallery include Stephen Durkee, Mimi Gross (daughter of Chaim Gross and Red Grooms wife), Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, and Alex Katz. Grooms never developed the detached stance of such Pop Art practitioners as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein or James Rosenquist. Instead he painted his own life, and became, literally, an actor on the stage of life -- in this case the art-as-life "happenings" of the downtown New York scene. Inspired by George Méliès...