A Room in Connecticut

The work of Red Grooms resists easy categorization. Blurring the boundaries between high art and popular culture, he fluidly moves among the mediums of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and film. Along with Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg, Grooms began experimenting in performance art during 1958 after studying at both the Chicago Art Institute and the New School for Social Research. In the 1960s, Grooms started creating installations he termed "sculpto-pictoramas," immersing his audience in carnival-like imagery based upon the worlds of entertainment and art. "A Room in Connecticut" belongs to Grooms's continuing series of "art about artists." This fanciful tribute to the American avant-garde depicts the artist Marcel Duchamp and his patron the collector Katherine S. Dreier - two of the founders of the Societe Anonyme, established in 1920 to promote American and European modernism - conversing in the art-filled library of Dreier's West Redding, Connecticut, home. Two works by Duchamp are recreated by Grooms: above the bookcase, the painting "Tu m'" (Yale University Art Gallery), and at right, a three-dimensional rendering in Plexiglas and aluminum of the "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (Philadelphia Museum of Art). As a bonus, Grooms lets us spy another two modernist figures through the window: Baroness Hilla Reby, the first director of the Guggenheim Museum, and the architect of the Guggenheim's building, Frank Lloyd Wright.