Submitted by Jean Dykstra on Thu, 01/12/2012 - 1:56pm
Jan Groover, Untitled, Courtesy Janet Borden Inc.
“Formalism is everything,” was the motto of post-modernist still life photographer Jan Groover, who died on January 1st, 2012, in Montpon-Meneterol, France, where she had lived for more than 20 years. Although she started out as a painter, who admired European still lifes of artists like Giorgio Morandi and Cezanne, her own photographic still lifes were spare, and her subjects utilitarian, focusing on everyday kitchen utensils such as forks, knives, and cake pans.
In 1987, Groover was one of a handful of women to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art; the museum’s longtime curator, John Szarkowski, compared her to Edward Weston. The same year, photographer Tina Barney produced a documentary about her, Jan Groover: Tilting at Space. Groover graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1965, and she subsequently received a fellowship to study at Ohio State University in Columbus, where she received her MFA. In 1978, she won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and used the money to buy her first large-format camera, which she used it to photograph complex tabletop still lifes. She taught at the State University of New York at Purchase for many years, until she and her husband, the artist Bruce Boice, moved to France.
By Jean Dykstra
