Art: Public Favorite: The Pit

Berlin-born George Grosz, 62, is no newcomer to scenes of horror. It has saturated his work, from his earliest sketches of World War I’s mutilated and dead to such latter-day oils as The Pit (opposite), done in 1946 and now a public favorite in the Wichita (Kans.) Art Museum. A Little Yes and a Big No, the title of Grosz’s autobiography, sums up his attitude to life. But though his little yes in the years since 1932, when he came to the U.S., has produced some pleasant, classic nudes and some sunlit passages of Cape Cod dunes, it is Grosz’s big no wrenched out of his own past and flung violently across the canvas, that gives his work its strength and impact. The Determined No. Each turn of Grosz’s early life in Germany seemed only to strengthen his determined no. Born in a lower-middle class innkeeper’s family and fatherless at six, Grosz rebelled against his cane-wielding Prussian teachers, and was expelled from school. Turning to art, he made his way through Dresden’s Royal Academy of Art, arrived in Berlin shortly before World War I.

It took only a few months at the Western front as an enlisted man in the Kaiser’s infantry to turn Grosz’s boyhood love of military panoply into a deep hatred of war. He was twice invalided, the second time to a military hospital for the shell-shocked and insane. After discharge Grosz found the subject that made his reputation: the postwar nightmare of inflation-ridden Berlin. Grosz glared at the world with jaundiced, penetrating eye, set down the characters he saw in portraits etched in gall: frozen-faced Prussian officers, lecherous, high-collared industrialists, black-marketeers, mutilated soldiers, and the city’s frumpish, lard-fleshed whores. Perversely, the rich enjoyed their own caricatures. But when the Nazis took over, they were not so understanding; Grosz’s savage anti-Hitler cartoons soon earned him a place at the top of their list of decadent painters. The Reluctant Yes. Grosz was saved from a concentration camp by an invitation to teach in Manhattan’s Arts Students’ League. Though he threw himself into his work, he soon disappointed his champion, vinegar-tongued U.S. painter John sloan, by going soft, burying his Germanic vitriol and trying to establish new roots as an illustrator. But as Grosz himself noted: “It is not easy to keep repeating yes, everything’s fine.” With The Pit, which Grosz identifies simply as “the story of my life,” the big no sounded loud and clear again. In it are the memories Grosz has tried to drown in the oil of his canvases: a bloated soldier from his war years, carrying his own amputated leg; a drunken alcoholic child; Grosz’s mother, killed in World War II air raid; an opulent nude being clawed by a bodiless arm; gibbets full of dancing figures; and brooding over all the specter Death and a blood-smeared female Europe, satiated to the point of idiocy. Grosz, who pulls no punches, says grimly of his bloody Mother Europe: “She is satisfied. She’s eaten too much.”