The Brooklyn Rail

In 1962, after having won a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sarah Grilo (1917-2007) moved to New York with her family from Buenos Aires. Grilo was a member of the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina in 1952, had shown with that group in Rio and at the Stedelijk Museum, and was included among the Argentine artists at the 1956 Venice Biennale. She was 45 years old and taking up residence in the city where Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and minimalism were all in evidence and could easily be seductive sirens luring her to imitative and creative destruction. She resisted those calls and instead reinvented herself, brilliantly documented in The New York Years, 1962–70, the first exhibition of Grilo’s work with Galerie Lelong.

A few events give us the socio-political context in which Grilo makes her move. The first in a series of military interventions, beginning in 1962, turned Argentina into an autocracy that would last, on and off, until 1983. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, while the U.S. sponsored Bay of Pigs counter-revolt in Cuba collapsed. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 leads the U.S. to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. That same year, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution confirmed U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, which would not end until 1973. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Against that background, Grilo’s move to New York acquires almost utopian dimensions: in Manhattan it was still possible to lead a comfortable life as an artist and live in a relatively secure social environment.

In a 1963 interview related to a show in Washington, DC, Grilo comments on her being in Manhattan, saying she has “an increased desire to work” and that she is “painting with such enthusiasm as I never had before.” Explaining this burst of creative energy is impossible. It may be related to a feeling of disconnectedness, being alone rather than in the groups she’d been associated with in Buenos Aires, or it may be that in New York she found a different kind of cityscape, disorderly and dirty. After all, John Lindsay, mayor of New York during the 60s, quipped that he didn’t trust air he couldn’t see. In New York, Grilo underwent a metamorphosis.

Included in this show is a 1953 oil on canvas titled Pintura—an ambiguous word in Spanish that can mean either paint (the substance) or a painting. The composition is a compendium of artistic motifs from the fifties: framing rectangles reminiscent of Concrete art, then a picture within a picture. The center of the canvas is a stylized still life that recalls the work of Ben Nicholson. A table with objects deployed on it painted as a vertical plane indicates elements of Cubism as well. Pintura is an excellent piece but conceived within a mélange of traditions. The New York work sets aside that dependence and constitutes a declaration of independence.

Grilo sees New York walls covered with peeling paint, graffiti, blurred or fragmented words and turns those de facto collages into her art. In a 1967 New York Times review of her show at Byron Gallery, John Canaday, a rather prickly critic, speaks admiringly of Grilo’s work as “large paintings that resemble sections of scaling wall liberally disfigured with graffiti and the remnants of posters and broadsides.” Canaday is less pleased with what he takes as political references in the work, but his observation, on which he unfortunately does not elaborate, is important. Grilo sees the city as a collage-in-action.

For instance, Charts are Dull (1965), 69 × 69 inches, takes its title from a Plymouth automobile advertisement (a copy hangs in the gallery). The Plymouth Belvedere has more space than its Ford or Chevrolet rivals. Grilo incorporates all of that, along with the letters M and S into a work in two registers. Above, a rusticated pink and below a smoky, dirty surface. The advertisement’s statement—in effect, figures are boring—is simply lost, removed from any context except the painting itself. Decontextualizing is certainly a Pop device, and Grilo shares that technique, but her work is not Pop; it is really about how we read the city as we stroll through it. This sense of the city as a fragmented newspaper page is confirmed in the wonderful Win, it’s great for your ego (ca. 1965–66). Grillo takes off from a Supp-Hose advertisement that suggests wearing these pantyhose would make “you could become an egoist.” Again, the real advertisement hangs in the gallery, so we see Grilo’s source. But incorporated here is a subtle observation on the Vietnam War, the idea that winning a war enhances your ego. A prescient denunciation to be sure at a moment when the war was still in its first, optimistic stages.

Sarah Grilo found an idiom during her New York years. She also found recognition, giving her the confidence to paint large-scale works. She left the city in 1970, frustrated by the seemingly unending Vietnam War, and passed into a relative obscurity from which this superb show rescues her.