All these years I’ve associated Red Grooms – his given name is “Charles Rogers Grooms” but I’ve never heard him referred to as anything other than Red – with a particular era of art in his adopted city of New York, a moment late enough in the history of Pop Art that a concern for the materiality of practice, so Abstract Expressionist a value, could re-emerged without any sense of the artist having gone retro. That’s true enough & it’s something that one could use to link Grooms up with some other fairly dissimilar artists, such as Jim Dine or Philip Guston.

But what I hadn’t realized is that Nashville-born Grooms is also sufficiently late in the history of Pop that his sense of mass culture really is a generation or so apart from Pop Art’s standard palette of icons. His reference for cartoons, as such, isn’t Nancy & Sluggo, but R. Crumb & the underground comix of the 1960s. The concepts too loud or too busy really don’t apply. So that when you see a set of portraits of other artists or prints executed in a “Japanese” style, it makes you suddenly aware that all this ruckus – a favorite Grooms’ word – in his more congested works is a choice. And when you look at the 3D pieces close up, such as the wonderful portrait of Picasso above, literally constructed out of paper, prints that can entail 20 or more applications of color, you get a sense of extraordinary care confronted with an almost wild wit (check out the little blue bird next to Picasso), an imagination as busy as Times Square with the patience of a traditional Renaissance master in visualizing & executing all this detail.

Grooms has a show right now at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA, not really where you might expect to find such an event. It’s only there until January 2, but if you can, you should make the trip to check out the master of 3D paper construction.

The conflict between these impulses is fascinating to contemplate. In order to achieve these crowded, detailed scenes – Grooms’ scenes & cityscapes are my favorites just because they accentuate this – which graphically look rushed & hurried, sketched rather than drawn, Grooms has had to become the most meticulous of craftsman. The feel & surface of his art is exactly the opposite of its process.

What, I wonder, would be a literary parallel to this disjunctive process? Certainly, from Henry Miller to Kathy Acker to Judy Grahn, there have always been writers who self-presented as members of the masses while in practice functioning as the most careful practitioners of craft. But there is a difference between the studied artlessness of a work like “A Woman is Talking to Death” & something has consciously high-styled as Grooms. The almost Swiss-watch precision of his print making feels radically different from, say, the far broader aesthetic decisions an Acker must make to write Pussy, King of the Pirates.

The tension between these two layers of Grooms’ work is, I suspect, a big part of what keeps it so fresh after nearly 30 years in the public eye. Neither the Olde Watchmaker nor Mr. Natural is ever going to win this debate. So a third element that often enters in & ends up displacing the standoff between craft & spontaneity is Grooms’ portraits of other artists. Picasso, Lorca & Hemingway are among the patrons of a bullfight. A 3D Gertrude Stein portrait is hung alongside a print of its individual pieces, flat “cut outs” on a two dimensional surface looking exactly like what they are: the parts to a paper doll. Artists – painters, writers, musicians – represent a separate vocabulary for Grooms – there is a wonderful painting of artists in the Cedar Tavern, with the figures in front flat & sketchy, those in back full of depth & action (Grooms puts himself in this picture, at the edge in the middle distance, looking “off canvas,” away from the scene). There is an affection in these portraits, even when there’s more than a little satire – Dali presented as a “pre-packaged salad” – it’s not that there’s no affection in his other work – it is, if anything, the dominant emotion in Grooms’ art – but that he’s freer in these portraits expressing such feelings. As with the formal standoff, the issue here is choice. Grooms is somebody who has made a conscious effort to not only enjoy his work, but to allow us in on the big secret – this is great fun! By the time you leave the retrospective, you’ll find it impossible to argue with this optimistic art.