Red Grooms used to show his artwork in the front windows of a Thompson Lane frame shop. It was the mid-1950s, and the now-world-renowned artist was a flame-haired teenager on a $45-per-week retainer, painting and biding his time.
“In Nashville back then, there was nothing like a painter,” remembers Grooms. “You were either a teacher or a commercial artist. I wanted to be rich, so at first, I wanted to be a commercial artist.”
Today his art — noted for its colorful pop style and broad appeal — is sought by the nation’s finest museums and top collectors. Grooms’ most recognizable works depict lively, caricatured scenes of city life in Manhattan, where he’s lived and worked for 65 years. But these days, Grooms is preparing to bring a career’s worth of stock back to Middle Tennessee — a move the 87-year-old referred to as an “orderly retreat” from New York City.
Marlborough Gallery, the blue-chip showroom that has represented modern superstars like Mondrian and Kandinsky, helped Grooms break out as a young artist in the 1970s. In April, Marlborough announced that it was closing, which prompted new representation for Grooms in the form of Tennessee gallerist and art dealer David Lusk. Moving his physical inventory from Marlborough storage to Beersheba Springs — the wooded retreat town in Grundy County long favored by Nashville elite — presents its own logistics tangle. The end result will be his entombment, Grooms says with a wry smile.
“Limelights and Zinnias,” Red Grooms
The paintings from his teenage days at the frame shop haven’t come back around (“I would love to see some of those,” Grooms says), but for the price of a used Toyota, interested patrons can buy a Grooms still life at David Lusk Gallery in Wedgewood-Houston. Plainly titled It’s All About Flowers, the show ends Aug. 31.
At a Lusk reception on Aug. 15, Grooms was open about his lifelong struggle with drawing straight lines. Soft edges, collapsed dimensions and a full-color palette bridge Grooms’ static flowers and his zany, career-making cityscapes, which burst with action and movement. Grooms’ colorful style continues to influence Nashville, from the now-shuttered carousel he designed for the riverfront to the cartoonish style of Myles Maille, a prolific local artist and Grooms acolyte.
Each still-life canvas combines watercolor — a medium cursed by Grooms for its punishing translucence — with acrylic and charcoal. Artists (and art teachers) throughout history have favored the still life because its simplicity enhances attention to color, light, perspective and decision-making. It is a stylistic mirror. For Grooms, now late in his career, it’s also a chance to place his fully matured hand among the great painters through history.
David McCarthy, a Rhodes College professor who interviewed Grooms at the Lusk reception alongside curator and Grooms specialist Marina Pacini, drew comparisons to Van Gogh, who painted flowers obsessively. After spending much of his career working against traditional painting, he’s ended up back at the fundamentals — like the boring reproductions he remembers seeing in his grandparents’ living room, he says.
“It’s all about the light,” Grooms explained, looking up at a dozen canvases. “If I start in the morning, it could be drizzling or raining, and then you might not get the same light.”
In several works, a colorful flowering foreground gives way to deep, lush greens and browns of Grooms’ screened-in Beersheba porch, where he passed the months during COVID. Practical considerations provide the best explanation for the still-life binge: lots of time, simple media, accessible subjects and a possible desire by Grooms to simplify composition as a way of distilling his own artistic identity.
The show also reflects Lusk’s success securing Nashville’s preeminent living painter. With more Grooms art heading down the interstate, the city may await a Grooms reinfusion. He praised the neighborhood as completely unrecognizable from his days painting here, pointing out beauty in both the historic Merritt Mansion and the area’s modern townhomes.
