| THE EARLY YEARS
 Warsaw,
Poland, “the Paris of the north,” was a marvelous place
to live when Adam Grochowski was born, October 11, 1924. The Slavic
capital was enjoying a brief period of independence after centuries
of domination and partition by Russians, Germans, and Prussians.
Music, art, theater, poetry, philosophy, and dance flourished in
a cosmopolitan society. Adam, intelligent, thoughtful, tall and
handsome, thrived in a close-knit Roman Catholic family headed by
his father, Anthoni Grochowski, a respected physician and serious
amateur painter; his grandmother Grochowski, and his stepmother.
Adam also was close to his mother, Natalie Grochowski, who had moved
to Legionowo, a Warsaw suburb, following her divorce. When Adam
visited, he often helped Natalie and her companion, Eugene Ostafin,
at their market stall. With Anthoni, he enjoyed kayaking trips on
the Vistula River and vacations in the Polish lake country. He and
his grandmother relished American movies shown in Warsaw theaters
and pored over books about America, particularly the West and its
native peoples.
Noting his son’s interest in art, Anthoni Grochowski allowed
him to observe his private weekend painting sessions led by leading
Polish artists. Adam also began sketching copies of Old Master paintings
and read widely about art and artists in the family library.
“My father never permitted me to work in oil,” Grant
told art critic Louise Bruner in 1973. The senior Grochowski, no
doubt believing he was guiding his son carefully, remained a harsh
critic of his offspring’s work. Adam was expected to become
a physician or an attorney. Yet by age 12, he had set his sights
on art as his true life’s work. “I kept it to myself.
When anyone asked me what I was going to be, I said I didn’t
know,” Grant recalled.
UNDER HITLER
Career choices became irrelevant in 1939, when Adam was
nearly 15. Adolf Hitler’s huge war machine swept into Poland,
launching World War II and defining the horrendous idea of blitzkrieg.
Poland’s armies fought far beyond German expectations. Still,
on Sept. 14, Warsaw was taken by the Germans, leading to a brutal
occupation of the city. Not only did Russia, once an ally, withhold
military help but its forces began attacks from the east.
For all citizens, life in Warsaw became a struggle against military
intimidation, cold, and hunger. Speaking Polish in public was forbidden;
shopping hours were limited; all schools were closed.
Because Hitler considered Slavs, the original inhabitants of the
Polish homeland, to be ethnically inferior, his troops sought to
eliminate them, along with millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies,
and those with physical and mental disabilities. Some three million
non-Jewish Polish natives were put to death in the Holocaust. Anthoni
Grochowski enlisted in the Polish Army as a medical officer and
was sent to the Eastern front. Adam never saw his father again.
The proud citizen-doctor-artist was one of 14,500 Polish officers
executed by the Russian army in the spring of 1940, in the forest
of Katyn.
Adam and his friends fled to nearby forests but soon came home,
turned away by fearful countrymen. They attended clandestine academies
hastily organized by families and teachers. By 1942, as Germany’s
offensives increased across the continent and in Africa, a major
military loss sparked an angry backlash against all males –especially
Polish youth. Adam, 18, was picked up at Christmas time in a German
sweep of railway stations. He was locked up in Pawiak prison in
the heart of Warsaw. While incarcerated, he watched in horror as
the first big ghetto uprising drew fiery Nazi reprisal. He remained
in Pawiak until, in the fall of 1943, he was shoved into a railway
car for the trip to Auschwitz. During the journey, he escaped the
train and fled to the forests, only to be picked up a few days later.
IMPRISONED
At Auschwitz, Adam, young and relatively healthy, was processed
quickly. A number was tattooed on his upper left bicep: 153362.
He was doused with DDT to prevent lice. His head was shaved and
he was given a skimpy uniform, assigned to a crowded barrack, and
put to work. Those sickly, old, or very young went straight to the
gas chambers. Long work days, little rest, and skimpy food led Adam
to attempt one more escape. It, too, failed.
The next time he left Auschwitz was in a prisoner convoy bound
for the notorious labor camp, Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria. Here,
a huge granite quarry consumed prisoners at a frightening pace –
even Auschwitz prisoners feared transfer to Mauthausen, where the
commandant, Heinrich Himmler, condoned a sadistic regime. Clad only
in thin cotton pajamas and wooden clogs, Adam and his fellow detainees
struggled up and down the 186 steps cut into the wall of the quarry
– the Steps of Death – breaking rocks by hand and hauling
them up. The average prisoner lived about two months; some 2,000
prisoners died each week. Between1938, when Mauthausen opened, and
liberation in 1945, nearly 200,000 persons, especially Slavs and
other Eastern Europeans, considered dangerous to the Third Reich,
were held and tortured there.
THE PRICE OF YOUR BREAD
Emaciated and heartsick, Adam answered a call for an artist to work
for prison staff. It was his salvation. “When they found I
could draw, I was assigned to the barracks with lighter duties,”
he recalled. “I did pencil portraits of the guards, greetings
for their girl friends, with rosebuds and butterflies as decorations,
and a crayon portrait of somebody’s sweetheart, with the Alps
as background. It took me an entire week to finish.” One particularly
cruel assignment had him paint a mural showing lush arrangements
of fresh food, to be viewed by starving prisoners. For his work
he was handed cigarettes, which had considerable trading value with
guards. “Later, sometimes, it was an extra ration of bread
that came my way, and I thought of my grandmother’s words:
Art paid for the bread that sustained my life,” he said later
in life.
MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
On May 6, 1945, the 11th U.S. Army liberated Mauthausen.
Adam Grochowski was 20, and so weak he required intravenous glucose
treatments before he could take food by mouth. He had been imprisoned
for 30 months and was alone in the world. Letters smuggled into
the camp had informed him of the deaths of his mother and grandmother.
At first, he planned a return to Warsaw, but when Adam recalled
his late father’s accounts of life under Russian rule, he
set his sights on living in America.
Adam, a so-called “stateless person,” stayed for five
years in a displaced persons camp in Regensburg, Germany, one of
hundreds of refuges established by the U.S. Government post-World
War II. Camp life was rough, but still a reprieve compared to the
concentration camps. Adam now spoke German and began to learn English,
even teaching others in the camp to speak this new language. And
again, art proved to be a saving grace. Drawing and painting, Adam
at first created sharp-edged work dripping with the bitterness of
a young person robbed of home, family, and health. Catharsis came
during his latter years at the camp, when Adam created series revealing
renewed hope and rising joy. At this time Adam also began to utilize
female imagery as symbolic of life and happiness.
A NEW HOME
In June 1950, he first set foot in his new homeland, one
of thousands of displaced persons relocated through the U.S. Immigration
Bureau’s Displaced Person’s Act of 1948. He was 25,
alone in the world, but filled with hope. A sponsor in Hamtramck,
the huge Polish suburb of Detroit, had arranged for his arrival
and initial lodging. Within the community he made friends with John
and Bernice Romaniuk, who helped him settle in a rented room nearby.
Adam began seeking work that would tap his artistic gifts and experience.
His first job was designing floats for the J.L. Hudson Co.’s
annual Christmas Parade through downtown Detroit. He also worked
on window displays for Hudson’s flagship store on Woodward
Avenue. On his own time he pursued personal art interests, setting
a lifelong pattern of merging avocation and vocation into a single
stream of creative endeavor. One lovely nativity scene he painted
in 1951, of Polish peasants bearing gifts for the Christ Child,
was reproduced on the cover of a Polish daily newspaper in Hamtramck.
He maintained sketchbooks and began to expand into new media. He
practiced his English speaking and reading skills.
PAINT BY NUMBERS
 Detroit
in the 1950s was booming. The auto industry was expanding production,
the elegant Art Deco downtown was the hub of commercial and cultural
life, and Detroiters, like the rest of America, were reveling in
a postwar economy. Pre-television, hobbies flourished as Americans
demanded stimulation and amusement. At the Palmer Paint Co., owner
Max Klein sought a means of marketing paint in small, controlled
quantities to the lucrative hobby market. His marketing and design
whiz Dan Robbins found the perfect way: paint-by-numbers. Prepared
canvases segmented into color-coded units, sold in kits with brush
and paints, allowed untrained Americans to create finished paintings.
The idea took off and by 1951 Robbins was looking for artists to
expand the line.
He remembers Adam Grochowski’s first appearance at Palmer
Paint, in 1951, in his memoir, Whatever Happened to Paint-By-Numbers?
“He was the first one to answer the ad, waiting at the door
before we opened. Adam was shy, quiet, and spoke with just a hint
of a Polish accent.” Adam’s portfolio was rich: Not
only could he draw a wide array of subjects in beautifully detailed
realism, but his paintings were outstanding. “I had expected
his painting to be tight, detailed, like his drawings. Instead,
they were impressionistic, almost in the style of Monet or Cézanne.”
Robbins made up his mind on the spot. Adam began work the following
week, first learning the discipline of parsing an intricate image
into a limited palette and simple shapes. Once trained, he became
lead artist, supervising a steady stream of new hires to keep up
with demands for paintable images. Palmer Paint Co. created Craft
Master, a premium line, and more artists joined the company. Among
them was Peggy Brennan, a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute
College of Art in Baltimore. At 22, independent and ambitious, Peggy
met Adam as her art director. Lithe, spirited, friendly, and striking,
the East Coast artist caught the eye of her boss, then his heart.
While the company struggled, their private relationship flourished.
They became engaged in 1954. Their marriage in Peggy’s hometown
was preceded by an impromptu reception at Craft Master, where the
couple walked under a canopy of large cardboard paintbrushes.
 Despite the success of its
product, Craft Master failed, filed for bankruptcy, and Adam and
Peggy were laid off, struggling freelancers. Then, in 1955, the
Donofrio brothers of Toledo – Tom, Tony, and John –
who had supplied containers for Palmer paints and Craft Master,
purchased the company and moved it to Toledo, Ohio. “Adam
and I were the only artists they brought to Toledo,” Peggy
Grant recalls. By then, Adam had become a citizen of his adopted
country and changed his name officially from Grochowski to Grant.
Already, Peggy Grant was becoming Adam’s Number One encourager,
enabler, supporter, and promoter. “I started urging him to
paint in oil, to get away from pen and ink and drawing,” Peggy
Grant recalls. “He had a talent to do more.” Adam first
worked with casein, forerunner of today’s acrylic paint, but
soon discovered the pleasure and workability of oil paint. He also
found pastels excellent for both relatively quick sketches and larger
finished works. In 1958, the young couple bought a house in a pleasant
West Toledo neighborhood and Adam set up a studio in their basement
– not the best place for his efforts. “He’d paint
all day Saturday, bring his work up on Sunday into the daylight
and be disgusted,” recalls Peggy Grant. They started their
family – two sons – and began coping with the stream
of physical and psychological ailments generated by Adam’s
years as a Nazi prisoner. Nearly always, however, Adam Grant could
find solace, inspiration, and hope before his easel. By 1970, he
had a marvelous new home studio with 12-foot walls of glass capturing
north light. His work blossomed.
FIGURE MASTER
His fascination with the human form drove his compositions,
to which he brought an Old Master sensibility. In 1973, he told
art critic Louise Bruner: “My biggest struggles take place
before I approach the canvas. When I think I have found the solution,
the actual rendering goes fast, usually not more than two sessions
of four hours or less.” Typically, he would create up to 25
sketches during sittings by professional models. From these came
pastel and/or oil sketches in which he worked out the colors. The
next stage involved drawings in charcoal and pencil at the scale
of the finished painting. Grant believed that in this process he
gained control over details, forms, and compositional relationships.
Onto prepared linen canvases he would transfer his composition by
working over the large-scale drawing, the back of which was covered
in charcoal. Paints would be mixed anew for each painting, sometimes
in several palettes, then applied in thin glazes with wide brushes
and palette knives.
Grant typically kept several works in progress simultaneously,
allowing each to grow at different levels in his subconscious. His
compositions mingled other themes with the human form, particularly
the circus, music, and mysticism. “He loved mysticism,“
Peggy Grant recounts. “His mother used to lay cards.”
One can feel the majesty of great figure painters such as Michelangelo
and Caravaggio in the initial visual impact, yet recognize the modernity
of Impressionists like Cézanne and Manet and Cubists like
Braque in the working of the paint. Yet Grant’s work reflected
his own times in his more limited palettes and the directness of
the poses he set into paint.
RETRACED STEPS
Art critic Jeanne H. Butler reflected: “Adam Grant
is probably unsurpassed in his ability to paint the human figure.
For more than 30 years Mr. Grant has been involved with the figure,
a brave commitment since his work is seen in the context of the
masters of the last five centuries. He would be classified as a
realist, but his approach is more conceptual than reportorial or
emotionally expressive. Without contour lines he builds up from
planes of color applied in wide patches, in the manner of Cézanne.”
Adam Grant’s work won awards at important exhibitions throughout
the Midwest and is in many prestigious collections, particularly
the Butler Institute of American Art, a fine, small museum in Youngstown,
Ohio. Under the direction of Louis Zona, the Butler lead the country
in celebrating American artists when most institutions still looked
to Europe for inspiration.
Despite declining health, Grant continued to paint as often as
possible. He died in June, 1992, 42 years after setting foot in
America. A retrospective of his work was presented at the Toledo
Museum of Art in 1994 – 16 works spanning the growth of this
amazing artist who shared so much with his adopted country. In addition
to promoting her husband’s mature work, Mrs. Grant also searched
for images from his European years. In a book of art by prisoners,
Not All of Me Will Die, by Janina Jaworska, she found a drawing
by one A. Grochowski depicting the horror of Mauthausen. “It
was such a shock to me to learn that there was another piece of
his from that period still in existence,” said Mrs. Grant
at the time. “I had been saying that someone should see the
very earliest work; then to find there was an even earIier work.”
In 1998, Peggy Grant retraced her late husband’s steps, visiting
Auschwitz and Mauthausen. She found several of Adam’s paintings
in the permanent collection of Auschwitz, now a park reminding visitors
of the depths of human cruelty.
“Adam wasn’t a hero,” says Peggy Grant. “He
was a survivor.” Today, the entire world knows the dark story
of the Holocaust, in all its forms. Still, the story of Adam Grant,
a talented Polish boy who survived to share his artistic gifts with
a world eager to put the past behind, is one of inspiration and
hope.
Biography text written by Sally Vallongo. Subheadings added for clarification. |
BORN
TO BE AN ARTIST