Robert Grosvenor, giant in contemporary sculpture who lived and worked in East Patchogue, dies at 88

Robert Grosvenor, a giant in contemporary sculpture who for decades lived and worked in East Patchogue, died at his home Sept. 3 of kidney cancer. He was 88.

"With the passing of Robert Grosvenor, we have lost a remarkable personality and a highly respected artist," said Andreas Hoffmann, managing director of Germany’s Museum Fridericianum, in a statement extolling Grosvenor’s "robust and at the same time enigmatic, dreamlike work." The institution currently is running the first comprehensive Grosvenor museum presentation in Europe since the 2000s.

"I saw him last about three weeks before he passed," said Simone Subal, senior director of Manhattan’s Paula Cooper Gallery, which has represented Grosvenor throughout his long career. "The director of the [Fridericianum], Moritz Wesseler, and I came out to East Patchogue and met with him. And it was so beautiful to talk with him about the exhibition."

After the opening on Aug. 30, days before Grosvenor’s death, "His son showed him images of the installation and how it all came together," she said, "and Bob supposedly waved his hands and arms and smiled so that he still was able to process the exhibition, which was wonderful."

Grosvenor’s work, which also encompassed photography, drawing and collage, is held in the collections of such institutions as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art; Storm King Art Center in upstate Orange County; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. This year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Large-scale sculptures

While he worked equally well in a variety of media, Grosvenor was best known for large-scale sculptures that often appeared to be somehow weightless.

"These large-scale sculptures, often referred to as cantilever sculptures, come off the ceiling, completely defying gravity and really surprising the viewer," Subal said. In the 1960s when Grosvenor began experimenting with such sculptures, "it was an absolute standout in the way you think of interacting with the space and the viewer."

Yet he continually moved forward. His fascination with aerodynamics and machinery led him to take ugly-duckling European cars such as the Dutch Daf and the French Solyto and reconfigure them in ways that did not attempt to beautify them but to make one see them anew and askew, generally with loving humor.

A boating enthusiast, he did likewise with small vessels. One aquatic sculpture, he recalled in a 2019 interview, unfortunately sank into Long Island Sound.

"I had a friend who was a naval architect. He made some suggestions and I made some suggestions," Grosvenor said. The resultant piece "didn't last that long. ... The waves got it, the wind got it. ... It was a temporary installation, let's put it that way," he said with a laugh.

Robert Strawbridge Grosvenor was born in Manhattan on March 31, 1937, the youngest child and only son of the wealthy Theodore Phinney Grosvenor and Anita Strawbridge Grosvenor. He was raised primarily in Arizona, where a 1940 household census shows the four children and no parents but rather a nurse, a cook and a maid.

After graduating from St. George’s School, a boarding school in Rhode island, "I had some friends who were going over to Europe and I thought, ‘That sounds great,’ " he recalled in 2019.

Expatriate art crowd

In Paris, he fell in with an expatriate art crowd that included the poets and writers William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. From 1956 to 1959, Grosvenor studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France, the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and Italy’s University of Perugia.

During this time he met VertaMae Smart, the future actor, NPR commentator, salon host and cookbook author, whom he married in 1960 after returning to the United States the year before for his stateside military duty. The couple had a daughter, Kali Diana Grosvenor, and later divorced. In 1966 he married artist Jacqueline Teresa Gardner.

From 1965 to 1967, he was a member of the Manhattan arts cooperative Park Place, in an abandoned Financial District building. Becoming one of the pioneering homesteading artists in the then largely derelict SoHo neighborhood, he held his first exhibition in 1970, at the Paula Cooper Gallery there.

Grosvenor, who eschewed assistants and prefabricated materials, moved from SoHo to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before finally moving to East Patchogue.

In addition to his wife and first daughter, he is survived by a son, Jeremy, of Suffolk County, and a daughter, Marina Yacoe, of Maine, both from his second marriage; five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. No funeral arrangements or a public memorial were announced.

"He inspired people by not only his work, but also his attitude to the work," Subal said. "One of the qualities that stands out most to me is that he tried and succeeded to defy categorization."