Art: From Hell to Holocaust

In the spring of 1932, the Art Students League of Manhattan sent a cable to Berlin Artist George Grosz, asking if he would consider a teaching post. The cable came just in time. In brilliant and merciless drawings, Grosz had been attacking German society since 1912; Hitler was one of his victims as early as 1923. Grosz knew he was in danger: he even had a dream in which a friend pleaded with him, “Why don’t you go to America?” Grosz accepted the invitation and in time became a U.S. citizen.

“A definite power wanted to save me from annihilation,” he wrote later.

Last week two Manhattan galleries opened a joint retrospective of Grosz’s paintings and drawings, most of them from his estate. The Forum Gallery has the work he did in Germany from 1912; E. V. Thaw & Co. the work he did in the U.S. until his death in 1959.

Since most of the pictures have never been seen before, the joint exhibition has an automatic excitement. But more significantly, it helps correct the threadbare notion that Grosz stopped being an important artist when he moved to the U.S. His ruthless portrayals of Germans made him the greatest satirist of his time; he drew and painted America with sympathy and even love. When the critics saw the change, they handed down the verdict that Grosz without satire was Grosz without stature. What the critics failed to see—and often still do—is that Grosz was much more than a satirist.

Gluttons & Murderers. “Next to me,” he said, “there is always a hell.” He was so wretched in the army during World War I that he had a nervous collapse and spent time in a mental hospital. Once released, he found that his whole country seemed insane: wherever he looked, he said, “barbarism prevailed.” In bold, sure strokes he drew gluttons, drunks, lechers, murderers. He drew officers, paunchy businessmen, high society women with animal appetites and animal indifference to the suf fering of others. It was a world of sadism and decay hiding behind a facade of monocles and iron crosses. From time to time Grosz was arrested and fined, but he kept up the attack until he crossed the Atlantic.

In America, Critic John Baur once wrote in an excellent Whitney Museum monograph, “the bitterness and disgust which had inspired the great German drawings evaporated like night mist.” Grosz painted the Manhattan skyline and the city’s lights and signs. Instead of decay, he drew sensuous female nudes—the human body exploding with youth and health. Instead of ugliness, he drew and painted lyrical pictures of Cape Cod. Edmund Wilson recalls how fascinated Grosz was by the idealized life pictured in American ads showing handsome young people with every material blessing. The scourge of Berlin, it seemed, had lost his sting, and “the stock thing to say about him,” says Wilson, “was that he was no longer so interesting.”

Raging Compassion. But as the Forum-Thaw exhibition shows, George Grosz did not stop growing in 1932. His nonsatirical pictures of the U.S. have the freshness of discovery, for Grosz was in fact discovering a new world. And as the second world war drew closer, his old ferocity returned in the form of a raging compassion. The satire of A Man of Opinion, which induces a smile of scorn, was gone. His later paintings were to a large extent cries of anguish, not against a particular people but in behalf of all mankind. Ghostly “stickmen”—men that were no longer men—populated his world; and in his tortured oils, the hell that was always next to him burned with the intensity of a holocaust. Whereas he once demol ished individuals with a few lines, he now loaded his palette with the colors of doom. Memories of My Mother got its title after it was finished, when Grosz learned that his mother had disappeared without a trace in a bombing raid on Germany. What Grosz was painting was not the end of one life but of life itself.