Red Grooms 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 when he was starting out as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown and was studying with Hans Hofmann.
Red Grooms with his work "Bookstore" in 1978
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963), which traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.
Hans Hofmann, Effervescence, oil, India ink, casein and enamel on plywood panel, 54.375” x 35.875”, 1942.
Hans Hofmann, Pompeii, oil on canvas, 84.25” x 52.25", 1959.
"Open Letter to Roland L. Redmond, President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Hofmann was among a group who would become known as The Irascibles, 18 painters and 10 sculptors who in May 1950 sent an open letter to the Met, rejecting the museum's "monster national exhibition" to be held in December. Francis Henry Taylor, the Met's Director, they said, had "publicly declared his contempt for modern painting," and Robert Beverly Hale, the Associate Curator of American Art, has "accepted a jury notoriously hostile to advanced art."