Taking art to the source

Toledoan to show late husband's paintings in Auschwitz

By Sally Vallongo - BLADE SENIOR WRITER
The BLADE, January 28, 1998

ww2ADAM GRANT was a master of paint-by-number art, the do-it-yourself hobby kits made in Toledo which soared to international popularity in the 1950's and 1960's. His many designs, converted into numbered spaces with corresponding paint colors, encouraged many a would-be painter to dabble. By the time he died in June, 1992, Mr. Grant also was a renowned figure painter.

Now his widow, Peggy Grant, wants to use Mr. Grant's earliest artworks to paint in a few gaps in his long and distinguished career, one that rose like a phoenix from World War II's ashes. She hopes to return a series of small but significant paintings he created right after Armistice to their place of inspiration: Auschwitz.

"I want to take his work back to the source. It's something I have to do before I'm too old and infirm," says the West Toledo curator, an artist herself."

Next summer Mrs. Grant hopes to visit Auschwitz and Mauthausen Nazi concentration camps where hundreds of thousands of Poles Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and Roman Catholics like Mr. Grant were tortured, starved, and murdered.

At the Auschwitz Museum, which holds the world's largest collection of art by Auschwitz and Birkenau prisoners, she plans to hand-deliver the paintings Mr. Grant created in a displaced person's camp. She wants it to be displayed with other prisoners' artworks as a permanent reminder of Third Reich devastation.

Mr. Grant's personal tragedy began in January, 1943, when the 17-year-old named Adam Grochowski was among some 800 Polish citizens rounded up and locked into a Warsaw prison. In October he was transferred to the first of several concentration camps, surviving as prisoner No. 156632 through World War Il.

Holocaust memories haunted him, Mrs. Grant says, and these early paintings, unlike his later confident, color-drenched, lavishly brushed works, hark back to that time. Small, spare, and angular, in jet black ink and pallid watercolor, they depict stark allegorical figures of rampant Death and Evil, devastated countryside, sobbing women, and humans bent over with the weight of degradation.

The works never were a secret, Mrs. Grant says.

"They'd always been kicking around in a portfolio, but I had never wanted to ask Adam to explain them," she says. She decided to include a few of the paintings in a major retrospective she organized in the autumn of 1996 at 20 North Gallery.

"I wanted to show how he evolved as a self-taught artist. I wanted to prove that he didn't start overnight painting bold strokes. He had to start somewhere," she says.

Mr. Grant, born into a family headed by a doctor who became a Polish army officer, had discovered his passion for art at age 10. Even during Warsaw's occupation, when Polish students attended underground schools, Adam Grochowski pursued art studies.

Mrs. Grant was unsure what to do with this series until she heard from Mary Ann Wojciechowski, a Lambertville woman born in a displaced persons' camp. Mrs. Wojciechowski, who devotes considerable time researching other family members caught by the war, had read about Mr. Grant's early works in the exhibition. She contacted Mrs. Grant.

That call from a stranger stirred Mrs. Grant and they agreed to meet. Mrs. Wojciechowski brought a 1970 book, "Not All of Me Will Die," created by Janina Jaworska from art collected out of concentration camps. A single glance at the book confirmed that drawing No. 131, a horrifyingly realistic scene of scantily clad men breaking rock in a quarry, signed A. Grochowski, was by Mr. Grant.

"I knew he was in Mauthausen. I knew he worked in a quarry. Looking at that drawing reminds me of Adam," says Mrs. Grant. "There's no doubt in my mind that it's his."

Other materials Mrs. Wojciechowski brought filled in more gaps in the horrifying picture. She learned that Adam's father had been murdered by Russians in a woods, that Mrs. Wojciechowski's mother had occupied a nearby prison cell during the long months of 1943.

AIready Mrs. Grant knew how her husband had survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen, where people with special skilIs could earn extra food, soap, and cigarettes. Young Grochowski painted greeting cards for German soldiers and other decorative objects. "He was forced to paint a mural showing lush arrangements of fresh food in the prisoners' food area," says Mrs. Grant.

"It was such a shock to me to learn that there was another piece of his from that period still in existence," says Mrs. Grant. "I had been saying that someone should see the very earliest work; then to find there was an even earlier work . . ."

She contacted Kryslyna Oleksy, vice director of the Auschwitz Museums, early last year. By April a reply came on stationery bearing a logo that's a double circle crossed by two lengths of barbed wire and accented with a red triangle, the Nazis' symbol for Polish prisoners. "Jews were not the only people imprisoned," wrote Ms. Oleksy. "The Nazis started massive relocation of prisoners from Auschwitz to other camps in 1943."

The museum official invited Mrs. Grant to submit the paintings for inclusion in the collection.

Mr. Grant never wanted to return to Poland, but his widow is determined to make the trip, and on her own terms: alone and focused on what her husband endured 55 years ago. "I want to see Auschwitz and Mauthausen and the prison in Warsaw. I dread going there, but I have to do it." To raise money for the trip, Mrs. Grant is selling other drawings, sketches and small paintings by Mr. Grant from 2 to 4 p.m. each Saturday at the studio, 2821 Latonia Blvd. The works she plans to donate to Auschwitz will be included in an upcoming exhibition about Anne Frank, to open April 1 at the University of Toledo Carlson Library.