Touchstones
Page 20
To understand the essentially fictitious nature of this alternative reality that is art it is not necessary to immerse oneself in the work of the great visionaries, like The Garden of Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, who gave shape to all the celestial and hellish terrors of medieval philosophy, blending them with his personal nightmares, or The Triumph of Death by Pieter Brueghel, whose apocalyptic imagination catches the decisive moment when human beings face what is beyond, or Goya’s Caprichos, which plum the gloomy depths of the subconscious. Simply pause and look at the so-called ‘realist’ painters, for example the still lifes in which Juan Van der Hamen y León, Tomás de Yepes, Sánchez Cotán or Zurbarán purport to reproduce fruit, vegetables, cooking items or hunting pieces with such prodigious objectivity that they appear self-sufficient, not the creation of a controlling mind, hand and brush. But it is clear that they are also pure subjectivity, perhaps more so than the great mythological or biblical fantasies, because they manage to persuade us that they are ‘pieces of reality’, portraits of what exists – ornaments, utensils or items of food – whose very perfection lifts them out of this imperfect real world of their models, which is subject to deterioration, ageing and extinction, a world that they can deny each day with their eternal freshness and youth. The four plates and the bare wooden table in Zurbarán’s Still Life, with its light and shade and its delicate contrasts of colour, is as mysterious and magical as a fantastic picture by Caravaggio or the intense spirituality of an El Greco. It is the discreet or flagrant alterations to reality, the creation of self-contained worlds which is the true domain of art, that element added by the artist to the materials that their time, their society, their own biography of heroic or petty deeds placed at their disposal, which through their skill and creativity they managed to transform into something different, something that we will later clearly associate with them. The way that Rubens rounds and thickens the female body in pink hues, fashioning it into sensual courtly, historic or mythological images; the way that El Greco slims and elongates and diffuses the human form in pale and iridescent light, in search of transcendence; or how in Goya men and women become animalised and degraded when they become a collective, a stupid and fanatical mass.
These wonderful fictions and many others like them – Flemish, Italian, English, German, French as well as Spanish – housed by the Prado, all had their origins in a defiance of the real world, but they have gradually become part of the real world through us, they have been subtly contaminating reality with their forms and values. Like in the Borges story, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in which a group of romantic dreamers manage to smuggle a completely invented world into reality, the rich imaginative reality of these artists in the Prado is there, at our service, to show us that the imaginary, this subterfuge of unsatisfied desires, is also of this world, an achievable experience. In the halls and corridors of the Prado, there is sustenance for all the demands of body and soul, the walls are full of myriad examples of how to combat adversity with the arm of fantasy, of how to defeat dissatisfaction by gorging oneself on beauty, of how to overcome the grey mediocrity of existence by turning it into the terrifying or majestic lives depicted there. The dazzling riches of the Prado is the best example there is that museums are not mausoleums but rather a city of living, vibrant beings, in constant movement, where reality and desire meld to create the life that we do not have, that we long for and that we can only achieve, vicariously, in the mirages of fiction.
London, January 1996
Grosz: A Sad and Ferocious Man
Here comes Grosz,
The saddest man in Europe.29
In the spring of 1985, during one of those exhausting book tours I agree to for reasons which are still beyond me, I escaped for a couple of hours to the Palazzo Reale in Milan, to see an exhibition dedicated to Gli anni di Berlino of George Grosz. Three months later, in the torrid Italian summer, I made a special trip to see the exhibition once again in the fantastic (artistically speaking) city of Ferrara. And, some time later, I was lucky enough to see it for a third and final time in the exhibition hall in the Mairie in Paris.
I already knew that Grosz was an artist whose work and life were very important to me, more than most modern painters that I admire or remember, for reasons to do with his talent, of course, but also because his work illustrates an important aspect of artistic creation: the relationship of art and fiction to history and life, to truth and lies, the type of testimony that fiction offers on the objective world. And I also knew – and I would know it more clearly in the following years, as I travelled the world in search of accessible material by or on Grosz – that my fascination for what he painted, drew, wrote, and did or did not do in his sixty-six years, could be explained through certain affinities and differences that I will try to explain in this essay. These might help to clear up some misunderstandings about the nature of fiction in art and about one of the most interesting artists of the twentieth century.
Grosz (his real name was Georg Ehrenfried Groß) was born in Berlin on 26 July 1893, but spent his early years in a small town in eastern Pomerania, Stolp, where his father looked after the Masonic Lodge. Gloomy stories, of coffins and mummies guarded by masons in that house, excited the imagination of the Stolp children and perhaps sowed in Grosz the first seeds of what would later become his obsession with death, a recurring presence in his paintings and drawings.
His father must have been rough, and perhaps brutal, because in his autobiography (Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein, a book where there are as many omissions as there are memories) Grosz mentions that he scared him and his sister Marta by showing them dancing skeletons in the garden. He died when the boy was six years old.
The family returned to Berlin, where they faced penury and danger in the streets, in the working-class neighbourhood of Wedding, until his mother managed to return to Stolp as a cook in the hussars’ barracks. Grosz spent his childhood and his adolescence there, and he studied in the local school until 1908 when, just before the end of his secondary studies, he was expelled for hitting a teacher.
Among the hussars of Prince Blücher, in Stolp, he doubtless learned to hate with all his heart (that extreme hate which, as the saying goes, is akin to love) Prussian officers, one of the main characters of the world that he immortalised (others are capitalists, criminals, religious people, the proletariat and whores). It was the Prussian officers that he perhaps caricatured with the greatest ferocity and vehemence. I use the word ‘hate’ advisedly, because without that destructive and exasperated passion that the word implies, Grosz’s work would not have been possible; nor would it have been possible without the extreme simplifications that a unilateral and schematic view of reality tends to convey.
He studied painting for two years (1909–1911) at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden, where stultifying teachers versed in the classics made him copy plaster statues and Hellenic marbles, and where his instructor, Richard Müller (who would later collaborate with the Nazis) thought that Van Gogh’s sunsets were ‘shit’ and that the expressionist Emil Nolde was a ‘filthy pig’. At that time, Grosz dreamed of being a local epic painter, of military triumphs, in the style of Grützner. And he was a voracious reader of adventure stories – James Fenimore Cooper, Karl May, Sherlock Holmes stories, Robinson Crusoe – as well as the popular serial novels full of horror and crimes that he confessed to having an early fascination for, alongside the terrifying and magical acts performed in fairs and circuses. All of this would help to form his artistic personality as much as, or even more than, his time at the Academy.
After he received his diploma, in 1911, he moved to Berlin, where he continued studying graphic art for a time, at the School of Arts and Crafts, while he sent drawings and caricatures to different publications. He had also begun to illustrate books. His first work accepted for publication, in 1910, in the magazine Ulk, depicts two stylised gentlemen watching an elegant couple go by: a conventional, bourgeois, scene, a thousand miles from the world that he wou
ld invent in the following years. But, from 1911, there begin to appear traces of the apocalyptic vision that would later be fuelled by the butchery of the First World War, the social and political struggles of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), and the intense Berlin years of Dadaism, revolution, artistic experimentation, anarchy, utopian dreams and bohemian life that preceded Hitler’s and Nazism’s coming to power on 30 January 1933.
Among these most visible traces are violence associated with sex, suicide and crimes. Some critics interpret this macabre propensity as a metaphorical description of a repressive society, the Imperial Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in which the strict and narrow moral codes that sought to curb the instincts, desires and fantasies of good citizens had instead the opposite effect of increasing neuroses and encouraging perversion and sexual violence. But it is also possible to detect in Grosz’s drawings in these years – peopled by strangled women (Ehebruch (Adultery), 1913), decapitated women, caught in adultery or dismembered, families that sacrifice themselves (Das Ender der Straße (The End of the Road), 1913), deformed beings (Abnormitaten, (Monsters), 1913), men attacking other men with axes, knives or guns, or maddened crowds that seem about to tear each other apart or else explode (Pandemonium (1915–16) – a Baudelairian maudit aesthetic, full of excess, extravagance, distortions and human ferocity, which the society of his time seemed to condemn, but in truth found seductive and stimulating. Because all these mutilations, ugliness and crimes are not depicted in an accusatory manner, but rather with an (albeit implied) sense of indulgence, akin to the festive way that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his horror stories. Grosz sketched an imaginary portrait of Poe in 1913, Wie ich mir Edgar Allan Poe vorstelle (How I Imagine Edgar Allan Poe), and his work would inspire him to draw that same year Der Doppelmord in der Rue Morgue (The Double Crime in the Rue Morgue). But whereas the work of Poe, Barbey d’Aurevilly and other horror writers tends towards rather unreal, abstract fantasies, in Grosz horror is always firmly rooted in real life. ‘I can paint a devil, but I can’t paint an angel,’ he once said.30 That’s right; but his devils always give the impression of being of flesh and blood.
The 1914–18 war had a traumatic effect on Grosz’s life. It accentuated the pessimistic and anarchic aspects of his personality and it furnished him with many experiences – images, rage – that would help shape the extreme, apocalyptic, dissolute and dogmatic nature of his artistic vision. How he was involved in the war itself is not at all clear. When the conflict broke out, Grosz enrolled as a volunteer in the grenadiers of the second Kaiser Francis. Six months later, in May 1915, he was exempted from service for medical reasons. From what he has said, and from what has been unearthed, it would seem that he spent most of this time suffering from sinusitis in hospitals behind the lines, where the wounded and mutilated were sent and where, of course, the pestilence, suffering and squalor were indescribable. There the war had nothing heroic to it: it appeared exclusively in all its savagery and stupidity. He was called up again on 4 January 1917, but was almost immediately interned in a psychiatric hospital in Gorden, suffering from a nervous breakdown, as a result of which he was officially declared as unfit for the army in April of that year. It seems that a famous Berlin sexologist, Dr Hirschfield, and a tycoon and patron of the arts, Count Harry Kessler, pulled some strings to have him returned to civilian life, away from a war that – as his letters and drawings of this time reveal – he abhorred with all his being.
In those years of the First World War, he contracted – the way you contract a disease – a furious indignation against his country and against his compatriots, that is well illustrated in this extract from a letter of 1916 to Robert Bell: ‘Day by day, my hatred for Germans grows with the irremediably ugly, anti-aesthetic (yes, anti-aesthetic) and horrible appearance of most Germans in Germany. To put it as crudely as I can: “I feel no kinship at all with such a mess.”’31 In this rather ‘unpatriotic’ state of mind, he painted his first masterpieces, among which were some oil paintings, a technique that he had begun to use in 1907. One of the most vigorous of these paintings, dating between 1917 and 1919, has either been lost or was one of his numerous ‘degenerate’ works destroyed by the Nazis: Deutschland, ein Wintermarchen (Germany, a Winter’s Tale). Even seeing it as a reproduction, the powerful language and the fevered imagination jolts us. His world is already there in place, in a picture that revolves around a uniformed bourgeois character, a monster of indifference and egotism, who sits in the centre of the picture, armed with a knife and fork, surrounded by food, beer and reactionary newspapers, satisfying his needs while all around chaos ensues. At his feet, three puppets – a priest, a soldier and a schoolteacher – represent the institutions that defend his interests and privileges. None of the four individuals seems too perturbed by the surrounding devastation: fires, landslides, and the disappearance of the law of gravity, because everything is turning, getting muddled and falling down. It’s true that there’s a spark in the little eyes of the bourgeois; but perhaps it isn’t fear, but rather excitement at the proximity of his pleasure. A naked woman, with fat thighs and buttocks and pendulous breasts, comes through the chaos unscathed. The painter himself has slipped into the bottom left-hand corner of the picture: a frowning man who is watching the end of the world quite unperturbed. That’s how he would also later describe himself in an ink drawing of 1917: Straßenszene mit Zeichner (Street Scene with Arist). He’s drawing with his pipe in his mouth, sitting in the midst of the city bustle, looking not at his paper but at the distorted landscape surrounding him: buildings, many crosses, and a little deformed man looking covetously at a naked woman, with a skull’s face, whose sex seems to be a spider. The artist, immersed in this world, also keeps his distance from it: he is creating, not describing, it.
Another of Grosz’s great paintings, the Widmung an Oskar Panizza (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza) is also a visionary representation in which death – a skeleton sitting on a coffin – is leading an infernal procession, like those in the nightmares of a Brueghel or a Hieronymus Bosch, painters much admired by Grosz. Within the bloody glow that bathes the picture, emanating from fires devouring buildings, a maddened crowd dehumanised by excesses and fear – with animal faces, or faces stripped of skin – is dying in a holocaust. Among them, some ridiculous characters are behaving in an absurd way: they are waving flags, brandishing sabres or crucifixes, blowing bugles. In the midst of the flames and the general dissolution, you can make out female forms. Everything is measured and oblique, everything is criss-crossed by planes that introduce geometric confusion and disorder into the old rational symmetry of the world.
John der Frauenmörder (John The Lady Killer, now in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg) dates from 1918. In this oil painting, with its contrasting strong colours made fashionable by Expressionism, we find on the same plane the victim, a naked woman with her neck severed, and her assassin, a stiff, well-dressed little man who is fleeing through the streets of a burning city. The insufferable tension in the picture comes from the subtle blend of story and language; the oblique planes emphasise the violence of the bloody corpse, and the flames in the buildings suggest instability and change, as does the instability of the perspective. And the green, yellow and black tones of the criminal express his cruelty as much as the murdered body of his victim. The image of women with their throat slit obsessed Grosz in this period, and in 1918 alone he produced three very similar pictures. His best works of the war and the post-war period would be like these paintings: blood-drenched incidents involving individuals or larger groups.
Although among his great work one must always single out at least a dozen oil paintings, Grosz’s genius lay not so much in his paintings as in his work as a graphic artist: a cartoonist, caricaturist, engraver, illustrator, poster designer, publicist, and a designer of book covers and theatre costumes and sets. As Orwell did in his newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and book reviews, Grosz invested in these ‘minor’ genres all the energy, imagination and rigour that other creators put into the �
�major’ genres, making them distinctive, lasting works of art. This is one of the achievements that I admire most in him, and in Orwell, who is similar to Grosz in a number of ways, including his ideas about politics. He used the forms that were most accessible to the general public, the most advanced technologies, to express his inner world, his obsessions and his fury, without sacrificing his moral independence and the right that every artist has to be a critic and to experiment with form.
Like Orwell, Grosz always found repugnant any idea of ‘Art’ with a capital ‘a’, reserved for an elite of pretentious people, light years away from ordinary men and women. According to his son Marty, every time reverential admirers praised his ‘artistic’ achievements, Grosz hurled abuse at them: ‘Kunst ist Scheiße’ (‘Art is shit’).32 The media that he worked in were a way of opposing dominant ideas about specialisation in art, looking instead to re-establish the link that once existed between the artist and the whole of society, when ‘art’, which was inseparable from magic and religion, was one of the basic needs of life. The choice of popular ‘genres’, however, did not mean that Grosz, unlike other artists who were committed to producing ‘popular art’, did not pay attention to technique. Instead, he worked intensively to create a language that was direct and accessible but also intense and original.