JAN GROOVER (1944–2012)
Jan Groover, an American photographer known for pictures that bear “more of a kinship with the work of Cézanne, Morandi, and Corot than with anything emerging from the darkrooms of her contemporaries,” died in France over New Year’s weekend, reports Richard B. Woodward of the Wall Street Journal_. The artist, represented by Janet Borden in New York, was sixty-eight.
“You had to go back to Paul Strand’s Cubist-inspired abstractions or László Moholy-Nagy’s experiments at the Bauhaus to find photographs comparably austere, intricate, humble, perplexing, and sensual as Groover’s tabletop still lifes of kitchen utensils or her displays of colored pots and bottles,” writes Woodward. “For much of her career she seemed like an eccentric school of one.”
Groover was among one of the first photographers to be recognized in the 1970s and ’80s by major New York galleries, for example, Sonnabend and Robert Miller, which at the time generally favored painters and sculptors. In 1987, she received a solo show of her photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. Director of photographs John Szarkowski wrote in his catalogue essay that he was “interested in her work because she is so fastidious about excluding from her art any overt reference to autobiographical, much less confessional, materials.” He further stated that he sympathized with her insistence that “a work of art lives and has its meaning exclusively within the chalk lines of its own playing field.”
Woodward notes that Groover’s photographs “explore the spatial ambiguities possible with a view camera.” He adds: “Her approach was by normal standards extreme. It was as if she sought to purge photography of the anecdotal, narrative, utilitarian, and representational associations that others cherished or found helpful. Asked why she had put a toy dog or a gun in a still life, she didn’t know how to answer. The object itself was insignificant in her mind apart from the forces that held it in place. Even when venturing outdoors, as she did in the late ’70s, photographing suburban homes and streets, or storefronts around New York City, she emphasized the spaces between things more than the things themselves.”
