Art: Wine’s Better than Acid

When Artist George Grosz was a youngster just learning to draw, in Germany 45 years ago, his painter mother gave him a piece of advice. Pointing to a picture of a well-fed monk holding a glass of wine aloft, she said: “George, when you can paint a glass of wine so that it looks as if you could pick it right out of the picture, then you’ll be a real painter.” Artist Grosz never forgot his mother’s words, but it was a long time before he cared to follow them.

Focusing on the Germany around him, Grosz became one of the most savage satirists in modern art. His enraged cartoons of blood-spitting consumptives, marble-jawed army officers, mincing whores and bull-necked burghers provoked Hitler to call him “cultural Bolshevist No 1.” Grosz hated Germany, and he yearned to live in the U.S. His sketchbooks were filled with dreamy portraits of himself as a cowboy or an Indian chief, his room plastered with U.S. posters on which he inscribed mythical greetings to himself from Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller.

Grosz got to the U.S. in 1932, and started following his mother’s advice. Instead of bludgeoning cartoons, he drew soothing pictures of Rubensian nudes, quiet beaches, bustling cities. Ever since, Grosz has been busy exploring life in the U.S. with a loving brush.

At the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts last week, Texans got a chance to see how they looked to Grosz. A Dallas department store, A. Harris & Co., had given him a $15,000 commission to visit the city and record his impressions. Grosz’s guides say he was like a kid at his first circus; he spent twelve hours a day studying Dallas’ cattle yards, stores, churches, bright neon lights and pretty girls. Then he depicted what he saw in 23 oils, water colors and drawings. All showed the vitality and hurry-up energy of modern Texas. Says Grosz: “It’s in the air. You find it in the way people walk and talk. I would like to live there if I were a little younger.”

At 59, Artist Grosz is not so old that he wants to sit back and retire. He hopes to travel even farther west, do a series on Hollywood picture making, then some paintings of San Francisco. Occasionally, friends ask why he never goes back to the acid caricatures that made him famous. That’s easy, says Grosz: “I’ve found out that I didn’t want people to hate me. I wanted them to love me.”