Books : The World and the Art of George Grosz

George Grosz, a Biography by M. Kay Flavell (Yale University Press: $39.95: 356 pages)

George Grosz was a Dadaist who became a chronicler of war and revolution, a Bolshevik who turned into a restless critic of the left and right, a “lifelong ironist” whose irony was almost always misunderstood. Above all, as we learn in M. Kay Flavell’s masterly new biography, he was a man of vision who beheld a world of horror.

“It seems as though we are standing at the beginning of a new world view, a new interpretation of everything,” he wrote in the early 1930s, shortly before leaving Germany for a prolonged self-exile in America. “To put it more clearly, the ground we are standing on is fiery, cracked, and shaking, as it must have seemed to the painters of the Middle Ages.”

We remember Grosz for his caricatures of Germany in crisis and collapse during the 1930s--headless diplomats, bull-necked generals, the Nazi rabble and their pathetic victims. But Flavell gives us a more complex and a more complete rendering of Grosz and his work: his gentle but realistic watercolors of the American scene, his portraits of family and fellow artists and of Grosz himself, even his efforts at entrepreneurial American capitalism. Thus Flavell invites us to contemplate a generous series of color and black-and-white plates of Grosz’s work, both the famous and the obscure, as well as a facsimile of the script for a radio advertisement for the private art school he opened in New York in 1935: “It is a privilege . . . to announce that MR. GEORGE GROSZ can accept enrollments from a limited number of talented pupils. . . . “

Tried and Condemned

Grosz emerges as a tragic figure, a gifted but quixotic artist who was misperceived and outrightly victimized by his political adversaries, his colleagues in “the art world,” and even the critics and historians who have written about him and his work. He was repeatedly put on trial in Weimar Germany on charges that his art was slanderous of the Germany army, or pornographic, or blasphemous. By 1933 he was condemned by his former comrades in the Communist Party as “a petty-bourgeois traitor,” a slur that endured, in one form or another, throughout his American exile. On his arrival in America the New York Times hailed him as a “Mild Monster,” and Malcolm Cowley wrongheadedly condemned him and his work as tainted by “a bilious dislike for mankind at large.”

Flavell, a professor of German at UC Davis, invested 10 years of research and writing to “Grosz.” She makes good use of her extensive interviews with Grosz’s colleagues and contemporaries--and her access to a wealth of unpublished source material, including letters, journals, and manuscripts--to give us a portrait of Grosz that is both intimate and scholarly. Indeed, the book is dense with references to his fellow German expatriates, from Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann to literally dozens of less celebrated artists and intellectuals, and the intense cultural tumult in which they lived and worked. In that sense, Flavell’s “Grosz” is not merely the biography of one man, but the history of an era and a whole generation of artists, writers and intellectuals.

The Artist in Context

At the same time, “Grosz” is a catalogue of imagery that helps to explain both the sources and the context of Grosz’s art--Flavell shows us fragments of work by Goya and Bruegel and Hogarth, and explains how these images were adapted by Grosz and grafted onto his depictions of the upheavals of the 20th Century. A line-drawing of a medieval German foot soldier materializes in Grosz’s “Interregnum,” and Durer’s sketch of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is given a gas mask in a contemporary rendering by Grosz. “Grosz was working in a moralistic tradition which had deep roots in European art and literature from the time of Erasmus and Bruegel onwards,” Flavell writes.

Her method as a historian, she explains, is to demonstrate how Grosz was influenced by the culture around him and to explain how he challenged the culture through his own art.

“Grosz once said that if he had not become an artist he would have been a revolutionary,” Flavell explains. “He always believed that art possessed the revolutionary potential of showing people how to see and think in new ways, but he became increasingly skeptical about the power of the artist to challenge the symbolic order of any major political and economic system, whether fascist, communist or capitalist.” As a result, Flavell insists, “his art remained political; but as he now saw himself powerless to do more than depict the collapse of humanist values . . . it moved from satire to something akin to tragic art.”