Art: GEORGE GROSZ

The idyllic landscape above and the luminous nude at the left are recent paintings by the once bitterest satirist in modern German art. In World War I, in which he fought unwillingly—he was a pacifist—Berlin-born George Grosz conceived an emetic loathing for man and all his works. A magazine illustrator in Kaiser Wilhelm’s reign, he turned a ferocious drawing pen on post-war Germany, ripped at its vitals in thousands of drawings that resembled the scrawls of a shell-shocked child. His savage pictures, famed in art circles the world over, showed thick-lipped, cigar-chewing bankers leering at mincingly decrepit prostitutes; mad-eyed, marble-jawed soldiers fighting crazily in corpse-strewn ruins; scrofulous, consumptive veterans (see cut, opposite page) coughing out pointless lives amid degeneration and squalor. Of all Germany’s “degenerate” artists, Nazis numbered him first. In 1932, despite his “Aryan” birth, Satirist Grosz wisely fled to the U.S. He became a citizen, got a Guggenheim Fellowship and a job teaching at Manhattan’s Art Students League. And then vitriolic George Grosz astonished his erstwhile admirers : his scratching pen gave way to an affectionate, romantic paintbrush. In lush, vibrant color, curling brush strokes that recalled Van Gogh’s, he painted sunclean, little nudes in airy land scapes, glowing dunes and beaches of health and optimism. From the painter of Germany’s grim, Gothic, post-war Walpurgisnacht, George Grosz was converted in the U.S. to a German lyricist celebrating love and nature with the old-time fervor of a Franz Schubert. Now he confesses: “I had been too nervous, too vain, too ambitious, now I can sit in the dunes and feel humble and shy and say a little prayer.”

Today dapper, slick-haired George Grosz spends his time, between teaching jobs in Manhattan, with an amiable wife and two strapping sons, in a pleasant waterside home at Douglaston, L.I. A systematic painter, who works long hours, his favorite hobby is carpentry. He cannot pass a hardware store without buying a saw. Only holdover from his macabre past —he confesses a love of horror stories.