Art: Heroic Vegetables

Maurice Richard Grosser learned to read Homer and hunt squirrel under the tutelage of the late William Robert (“Old Sawney”) Webb, white-bearded, tobacco-chewing Confederate veteran, classicist and schoolmaster in Bell Buckle, Tenn. “Old Sawney’s” star pupil, Grosser entered Harvard in 1920 with the highest-in-the-U. S. college entrance marks in mathematics and Greek. Of Art he was more innocent than the youngest dauber in a modern progressive school. In 1922, when he was a restless sophomore, a leering classmate urged him to go to an art class in South Boston, because there he might see “real naked women and it only costs a quarter.” Grosser went and returned breathless, not because of the model (that night it was a shabby old man) but because he drew better than anyone in the class and loved it.

By May of the next year Maurice Grosser, a “natural,” had been given an exhibition at Harvard and had even sold some watercolors. He graduated with honors in mathematics, which he has never used since except for reading himself to sleep. First as a workman in the stained glass factory of famed Charles J. Connick; then on a Harvard fellowship in Italy, where he lived with a peasant family in Anticoli and the goat’s milk stuck to his teeth; then employed by Muralists Victor White and Barry Faulkner to put vague decorations on expensive Manhattan walls, Maurice Grosser adjusted himself to his talents. The adjustment was fairly complete by 1929, when in an effort (successful) to stop smoking he went on a five-day binge and got. fired. He started painting for himself.

Since 1930, when he had his first exhibition in Paris, Grosser has enjoyed a quiet —and growing—reputation in Europe, almost none in the U. S., where he is known, if at all, as a collaborator with his old friend, Composer Virgil Thomson, on the Gertrude Stein operetta, Four Saints m Three Acts. Yet Maurice Grosser’s painting belongs to a school which is just what the doctor ordered for critics who carry on indiscriminately about “modernism” in art (see p. 36). Grosser owes nothing to conventional impulses yet is a firmly “representational,” sensitive draftsman. His particular passion, however, is color. Exasperated, like other young perfectionists, at the chemical impermanence of certain modern ready-made paint, Grosser began some years ago to grind and mix his own colors, a process in which he has taken infinite pains. Result is a clean brilliance of color made luminous by transparent strokes in oil over tempera underpainting.

Last week at the Galerie Quatre Chemins in Paris, Maurice Grosser displayed his latest and most interesting creations: paintings of fruits and vegetables in heroic sizes (twice to twelve times nature). By this simple device of magnification, Grosser has lately made strawberries and peppers not merely more edible but more visual, has shocked even jaded critics into recognizing the richness, delicacy and care of his painting. As untidy in his life as he is tidy in his painting, stocky, mocking, hard-working Artist Grosser last week fidgeted, tore up match boxes, explained his preference of subject matter with classic concision: “Humans wiggle; vegetables just rot.”