Marlborough Graphics New York is pleased to present Red Grooms: Ninth Street Women meet The Irascibles (The Monotypes). Coinciding with the current presentation of recent paintings by the artist is a new series of monotypes inspired by the 2018 novel by Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women. It is through the printmaking process that Grooms has recollected and re-constructed history, merging the infamous 1951 photograph from Life Magazine of the Irascibles with the women of Ninth Street. The exhibition also pays homage to the artists, friends, and personalities Grooms encountered during these early formative years in New York.
“The Sparkling Amazons,” the term coined by Thomas Hess to described five women who revolutionized the modern art world in postwar America, was a group comprised of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. The Irascibles, or Irascible 18, were the labels given to a group of American abstract painters who in 1950, penned an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to express their intense disapproval and commitment to boycott the museum’s exhibition American Painting Today: 1950. The subsequent media coverage and iconic photo of the group published in Life Magazine in 1951 gave the Irascibles notoriety and helped to canonize the term ‘Abstract Expressionism.’
By reconstructing the image with the inclusion of all the notable Abstract Expressionist artists of the period, Red Grooms attempts to recognize the often-overlooked contribution by women artists to the AbEx movement and the significant role they played as bold innovators within the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s. Grooms became an active participant in 1957, joining the cooperative Phoenix Gallery on East 10th Street, the then heart of the art world. He would later start City Gallery with Jay Milder in his own loft on West 24th Street. “We were reacting to Tenth Street. In '58 and '59, Tenth Street was sort of like SoHo is now, and it was getting all the lively attention of everyone downtown. We were just kids in our twenties and had a flair for attracting people to our openings."
These monotypes were printed at Derriere L'Etoile Studios, a fine art printmaking studio which was founded by Maurice Sanchez in 1978. Sanchez notes, "Red Grooms in a print studio is like a three-year-old child in a toy store, he's immediately excited and gets his hands on everything he can. However, he is anything but naïve. He has a vast amount of wisdom and a wealth of experience. Watching him work with this subject matter was particularly interesting because he was adjacent to it, the fact that he was an adoring fan but also a fixture in the scene. He is living history."
Red Grooms was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937 and has lived and worked in New York since 1957. Always vibrant, inventive, and witty, Red has reinforced the pride that New Yorkers have for their city. As somewhat of an outsider-originally from Nashville, with early sojourns to Provincetown and Chicago-Grooms has been able to clearly witness what makes the city so unique.
