James Grashow, a sculptor and woodcut artist who made his name with outsize installations fashioned from corrugated cardboard, including a sprawling — and intentionally impermanent — version of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, died on Sept. 15 at his home in Redding, Conn. He was 83.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Lesley Grashow, said.
With influences as diverse as 16th-century woodblock prints and 20th-century Pop Art, Mr. Grashow channeled warring impulses toward the whimsical and the dark into a variety of mediums, in two dimensions and three.
He was an award-winning editorial illustrator, producing wood engravings, often brooding and phantasmagorical, for The New York Times, Esquire, Time and many other publications. He also created art for album covers, including Jethro Tull’s “Stand Up” (1969) and the Yardbirds’ “Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page” (1971).
In his late 70s, he took up woodcarving and created what he considered his tour de force, “The Cathedral,” an eight-foot-tall basswood sculpture of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, carrying not a cross but a Gothic cathedral on his back, with snarling demons dancing at his feet.
But Mr. Grashow was perhaps best known for large, often fantastical installations made of the most ephemeral of materials: cheap, disposable corrugated cardboard, which he bought by the truckload in 4-by-8-foot sheets.
“The City” (1980), made from cardboard, plywood and fabric, was a 13-foot-tall aggregation of anthropomorphic, devilishly smirking skyscrapers, at once cartoonish and haunting. “The Great Monkey Project” (2006) comprised 100 life-size cardboard monkeys dangling from vines.
Unlike traditional sculptures in marble or bronze, “Corrugated Fountain,” his packing-box riff on the Trevi Fountain, was not built to endure. Evanescence was the point.
“All artists talk about process,” he said in a 2012 video interview for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., one of the museums where he displayed the fountain. “But the process that they talk about is always from beginning to finish, and nobody really talks about full-term process — to the end, to the destruction, to the dissolution of a piece. Everything dissolves in eternity.”
This philosophy in some ways echoed the mid-20th-century artist Gustav Metzger’s theories of auto-destructive art — work that was created to be demolished — but Mr. Grashow’s vision was more meditative than violent.
His reinterpretation of the fountain — one of Rome’s most famous landmarks, designed by Nicola Salvi in the mid-18th century with influences from the great sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini — took up an area of roughly 20 by 30 feet, and was about 12 feet tall. Its centerpiece, as in the original, was a proud (if cardboard) rendition of Oceanus, a Greek deity of the waters.
Mr. Grashow exhibited his fountain in four museums starting in 2010. It never made it to a fifth.
For the final showing, at the Aldrich, Mr. Grashow moved his heretofore waterless fountain outside, to meet its fate under the elements. Within a few weeks, rain had reduced the monumental work to a mushy tangle — his version of the ancient statue in ruins in “Ozymandias,” the Shelley poem. Visitors brought flowers, as if to a grave.
The idea was “to make something eternal, something extraordinary,” Mr. Grashow said in a 2012 documentary about the project, “The Cardboard Bernini.”
But also something transient. “Like the Afghan Buddhas, like the World Trade Center,” he added, “everything has its time.”
Like many of Mr. Grashow’s creations, “Corrugated Fountain” evoked themes that were “based in my own emotional problems,” he said in an interview for the 1986 book “Innovators of American Illustration” by Steven Heller, an art professor and former art director for The Times. “The basic one was croaking. Death has been the single prime force in everything that I’ve ever done.”
James Bruce Grashow was born on Jan. 16, 1942, in Brooklyn, the middle of three children of Edward Grashow, who owned a company that manufactured automobile antennas, and Estelle (Moscow) Grashow. As a child, he loved to assemble structures using the cardboard boxes at his father’s plant and often lost himself in drawing monsters and goblins.
He did not know it at the time but he was dyslexic, and he struggled mightily as a student at Erasmus Hall High School in the Flatbush neighborhood. Art became his escape, particularly after he graduated in 1959 and enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied painting.
“As soon as I put my foot in the door, everything was fantastic,” Mr. Grashow said.
After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1963, he earned a Fulbright scholarship to study painting in Florence, Italy. In Europe, he found inspiration in the woodcut prints of Albrecht Dürer, as well as in the Pop Art on display at the 1964 Venice Biennale, including Claes Oldenburg’s giant tube of toothpaste.
Returning to New York, he took up sculpting while embarking on a career as an illustrator for magazines and newspapers. His signature work was playful yet dark. For a 1977 Opinion article in The Times on the effect of urban sprawl on the suburbs, for example, he conjured a massive, wild-eyed dragon made from jagged skyscrapers lurching toward a leafy town.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1968, Mr. Grashow is survived by a daughter, Zoe Grashow Klein; a son, Zachary Grashow; a brother, Mark; and five grandchildren.
Over the years, his work was featured in dozens of galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and at the Armory Show in New York. He was also a longtime teacher at Pratt and other institutions.
Late in life, Mr. Grashow pivoted, taking up woodcarving to create “The Cathedral,” a piece built — unlike his cardboard sculptures — for the long haul.
“Of course I did woodcuts, but never carved like this,” he said in an interview last year with Mr. Heller.
Although Mr. Grashow was Jewish, he chose Jesus as his subject because the Christian savior symbolized, for him, endurance through faith, even with death looming.
“It was a commission,” he added, “but it was all my idea, inspired by a now 82-year-old man — me — trying to figure out how to keep his faith alive in an increasingly chaotic world.”
His venture into this new medium was the subject of another documentary, “Jimmy and the Demons,” which was directed by Cindy Meehl and premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June. The resulting piece, which he finished in June 2024, took four years to complete, giving Mr. Grashow a final opportunity to ruminate on his own impermanence.
“I feel like I’m running in front of a wave for three years,” he said in the film. “And I never thought I’d get here. I never thought it would be finished.”
He added: “And now I feel the wave catching up to me. It’s a big wave, and I’m a little, little man.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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