For Adam Grochowski, the term “starving artist” was a cold, hard reality. As a teenager, he was placed in a concentration camp along with other Catholic males old enough to resist the Nazi invasion of Poland. Grochowski survived the Holocaust, though, by drawing for the soldiers. It became his meal ticket.
The guards paid him in cigarettes, which he traded for food and favors. If he had followed the rules, he would have died.
After the war, Grochowski immigrated to America, changed his name to Grant and gained prestige as one of the designers of the paint-by-number kits. One of the last pieces Grant did before his death in 1992 was a portrait of Ignatius Loyola. That painting became the basis for the giant mural of Loyola that hangs in the Cintas Center.
