Question:
How did you happen to hear of Hans Hofmann as either an artist or a teacher?

Red Grooms:
Well, I think the way it happened was, my mother had seen an article in Life Magazine about Hofmann’s classes in Provincetown. I’m from Nashville, and my whole family is in Nashville. My aunt’s family had gone up to Provincetown, and they liked it a lot because they are antique buffs, so she said, “Oh that’s a great place- it would be great place for you to go and study art.” I think that’s how I got my break to go to Provincetown and study with Hofmann.

Question:
What happened when you got there? Did you immediately go to Hofmann’s School?

RG:
Well, it was really quite something. I had taken a Greyhound bus from Nashville to Boston, which is a long trip, and then I got on a ferry from Boston to Provincetown and it was very exciting- I remember going up the ramp of the ferry to the wharf, and it just seemed like a wonderful place. It was very different than anything I’d experienced before. I don’t know how I did it, but I found an apartment to live in, and then probably quickly went and registered for the classes. I loved the town- you could walk everywhere.

Question:
Had you been studying art before this?

RG:
Yes, I started studying when I was about 10 years old, and took private lessons. In high school, I majored in art for four years, and also took private lessons. Then I was supposed to go to the Art Institute of Chicago for a degree, and I went there, and at age 18, it was the first time I had gone to a big northern city. It was quite exhilarating, but scary- I hung on for a couple of months, but I just couldn’t take it. My parents came up to Chicago and drove me back home. And then I came to New York and I studied at the New School with Gregorio Prestopino, who is an artist whose work I had seen and liked a lot. He was in the vein of Ben Shahn, a social realist, and I liked that work. I studied with him for three months, and then went back to Nashville and attended Peabody College there for a year and studied art there. When the summer of ’57 came along, and I got this opportunity to go study with Hofmann in Provincetown.

Question:
What was the first day of class like?

RG:
I probably started right in with the drawing from the model- he had a terrific, quite large room- it seems like it had a balcony in it or a high ceiling. There were people all over the place working on their drawings, and there was a model on a platform in the middle of the room. I had drawn from the model, before but I always had trouble getting interested in it. I couldn’t get psychologically involved with the model, and it wasn’t that I drew so well, but I drew very fast, so I’d be finished in 5 minutes and it was supposed to be a half-hour study. Hofmann would come around, and I believe he worked on people’s drawings. A lot of the students worked in his style because they had been coming to the school every summer, so they had developed a Hofmann-like style. I didn’t; I drew in a different sort of way.

Question:
Did he come to you? What did he say?

RG:
He think he probably tried to steer me in the direction he wanted people to work in, which somehow I either refused to do or I didn’t understand, or some combination of both. I had heard of the famous push/pull, but I wanted to isolate the figure in deep space, which he later commented on in a critique- he said my work was “doll like, “ which was exactly right; that was what I had intended it to be. The work I did later was very much in that direction of doll-likeness.

Question:
Had you seen his paintings at that point?

RG:
I wish I could say that I went to his own studio. He did make me a monitor; Jimmy Gahagan was head monitor- he was great, he had been there for years and he knew the ropes, and I was put under Jimmy. Mostly my job was to sweep up, but that was kind of neat because I was around Mr. Hofmann a little bit more privately when people weren’t around.

It was very nice being around him. He was such a grand figure, you know. He had this terrific accent, and there was a particular way he looked…

I became enamored of his paintings later. I admired him enough to want to be his student, but I did sort of rebel. It wasn’t until years later that I saw his show at the Venice Biennale, and it was just terrific. I could appreciate much more what he was getting at.

Question:
Do you have any of the drawings you made in his class?

RG:
I don’t have any of the drawings, but I do have a painting that I showed in one of his public critiques. He would have critiques every Friday, outside, and people would lean their paintings up against the wall and he would talk about them. One of his great methods was to take colored paper and stick it on the painting to demonstrate what you could do with the color. But I always thought that he realized that the solid piece of paper looked good in the mushy field of color. His own work went in that direction in a great way, I think. I’ve often wondered if he picked that up from his own teaching techniques.

I remember another technique he had was to tear a drawing in two and stick it back together to give it more dynamic. It showed that if you would go beyond your conscious concept of construction, the dynamics could get more interesting.

That was a very exciting time in Provincetown, and some of his older former students who were now working as professional artists- like Jan Muller and probably Mary Frank, they would come and hang out at the back with the students at the critiques, and that was exciting. These were artists who had graduated were still involved with the school. I think that people could just walk up off the street and watch him give his critique.

Question:
You said that later on, after you had stopped studying with him, then you were influenced by Hofmann. How were you influenced by him?

RG:
I loved his work. There was always this line about him that he was a better teacher than he was an artist, but I don’t think that was true, actually. He really was a great painter. His work has a strong position with Pollock and de Kooning and Kline and Rothko. He’s right in there with them, I would say, as the top level of that great generation. But for some reason, he was a bit put down, I guess, by the success of his teaching. And of course, he was so influential to a generation that’s a little older than mine, but a generation that influenced me, like Larry Rivers.

The generation that I actually identify with was the generation in Provincetown who ran the Sun Gallery: Yvonne Anderson and Dominic Falcone. They were kind of the anti-Hofmann because their idea was more figurative. They were showing artists like Lester Johnson and Tony Vevers and Alex Katz and Jan Muller. They had this program that I liked and I fit right into, which eventually kind of went in a Pop Art direction.

But Hofmann was a monumental fixture, he was a real patriarch in Provincetown, I was lucky to be there- I believe that the year I was there was the last year he had his public class. He had a wonderful career in his eighties; he painted very well, did some of his best work.

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