In 1973, Red Grooms, his wife Mimi and their daughter Saskia (named after Rembrandt's wife) spent a summer at my place in the Catskill Mountains, 18 miles northwest of Woodstock. They made a film there called Hippodrome Hardware, in which all three of them, using wings they'd fashioned and painted up real cool, flew around a circus tent. Magic stuff. They showed it at (another) local commune, and everyone got stoned and fell asleep. Red was pretty bummed by that. I didn't keep in touch, and I didn't know him all that well to begin with -- I was just one more stoned hippie out there on the kozmik tree farm -- but he and his family were neat people to be around. I mean, wow. You know what I mean? The following is from The New York Times Sunday Book Review section, at your newsstand two days hence, on the website as we speak.

IN SUNDAY'S BOOK REVIEW

Detail from "Looking Along Broadway Towards Grace Church" by Red Grooms (Courtesy of the author and Rizzoli)

Red Grooms
By Arthur C. Danto, Timothy Hyman and Marco Livingstone

"For more than 47 years" Red Grooms, "who is part Thomas Rowlandson and part Daumier, has been turning the city into a raucous, tumultuous, Rabelaisian world of wonder," says Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "This new book � with hundreds of pictures, a couple of lively essays on the art and a penetrating interview of Grooms by another artist � is the best account of his accomplishment we have had. Even his most passionate admirers may be impressed by the sheer range of his work."

An essay by the art scholar Marco Livingstone notes that Grooms "has a powerful talent for drawing and a foundation in classical painting," writes Hoving. "Livingstone finds the soul of Grooms's style in an ungainliness that is, somehow, elegantly stylized." In another essay, "a very thoughtful meditation," the art critic Arthur C. Danto "zeroes in on Grooms's comedy. ...

"The horde of pictures here, intelligently laid out by the designers, will reward readers thousands of times over; in every work there is always something new to discover no matter how many times you revisit it," says Hoving....

• Read the Review
• Slide Show: The Art of Red Grooms [ y e s ! ]

	From ''Red Grooms'' (Rizzoli)
	''Studio at Rue des Grands-Augustins'' (1990-96) by Red Grooms. Reprinted with[out] the permission of the artist.