In any event, in Grosz’s fictional world, women and sex have nothing to do with love, for there is no place for that, or with pleasure, if we take pleasure to mean something that enriches the life of men and women, but rather they are the exclusive domain of the violence, cruelty and animal instincts of a world in which the only possible relationship between the two sexes appears to be one of domination and destruction. The word ‘libertinism’ that in the eighteenth century came to describe the delicate ways in which a culture free from sexual taboos staged the act of physical love through a series of games and rituals, dignifying it, sublimating it and turning it into an elegant and imaginative art, where men and women play the leading roles, is at the opposite extreme to the elemental and paroxysmic erotic world of Grosz. With very few exceptions, like the splendid pen-and-ink drawing of 1912 entitled Orgie, in which several couples intertwine in an enthusiastic pagan celebration of instinct,34 there are no games, ceremonies, play, enjoyment, humour or feeling: just copulation, blood and animality.
Perhaps Grosz was taking his revenge on these unconscious manifestations of his Puritan education, by making religious people another puppet in his artistic world. Because blasphemy has an equally prominent place as murder, suicide and female buttocks, especially in the drawings of Hintergrund (Backcloth), where the vitriol is directed at priests and at Christianity. It is true that these drawings and cartoons are not as strongly focused as his diatribes against soldiers or bankers. The pastor or priest can be seen supporting the execution of workers by executioners dressed as bosses (Das Vaterunser (The Paternoster), 1921). In the midst of infernal cataclysms, he raises his cross and gives blessings, as if justifying or denying the horrors. The enemy of truth and compassion, he is a naïve or blasphemous cynic, who finds it amusing to balance a cross on the end of his nose (Seid untertan der Obrigkeit (Obedience to Authority), 1928), and a militarist: he delivers bellicose sermons and what comes out of his mouth are not words but bullets, sabres and mortars (Das Ausschüttung des heiligen Geistes (The Dividends of the Holy Spirit), 1928). He is also seen as servile to the powers that be – capitalists and the military. Hypocritical, grim and shadowy, he is another of the ‘pillars of society’.
This is the title of one of the most vivid oil paintings that Grosz produced in 1926, his most fertile year for painting, Stutzen der Gesellschaft, now in the Nationgalerie in Berlin. Out of the by now quintessential background of fires and soldiers advancing swords in hand, four figures emerge. There is an intellectual who is waving an olive branch, clutching his pencil and newspapers, wearing a chamber pot on his head, a pathetic emblem of the importance of his ideas. A social democrat has a little national flag and a badge proclaiming, ‘Socialismus ist Arbeit’ (‘Socialism is work’), but out of the top of his head comes not arguments but a pile of shit. But it is the terrifying Nazi bourgeois capitalist in the foreground who is the most unforgettable image. He looks horrendous – with a carnivorous mouth, a monocle, a scar and an open skull that contains a lancer on horseback instead of his brains – and in each hand he carries a symbol of his ideals: a glass of beer and a sabre. Above the three of them, with his arms outstretched and the expression of a predator surveying carrion, we find the religious figure, dressed in a black habit: his ferocious smile makes it very clear that he approves of the posturing and the horror around him, and that perhaps he even lives off it all.
The extraordinary force of the picture transcends its critical focus and historical references and comes across to us as an autonomous fictive reality, the product of a corrosive imagination and an immense artistic skill. A reality depicting alienation, barbarity, theatricality and stupidity, drawn in aggressive colours that seem to be forced to coexist despite being essentially repellent, and full of an exaggerated number of figures, objects and narratives in a reduced space. We feel the claustrophobia, the violence and the madness of a humanity that has lost its direction and is heading towards inevitable catastrophe.
In these years – from 1925 to 1928 – Grosz went back to painting after a long period working almost exclusively as a graphic artist. In this period he produced some of the most remarkable oil paintings of our time. Like Sonnenfinsternis (The Eclipse of the Sun) of 1926, in the Hecksher Museum, Huntington, New York, in which the capitalist and the general (in this case, Marshal Hindenburg, the President of the Republic) are giving orders to a group of bare-headed politicians. Or Agitator (The Demagogue) of 1928, in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and a number of important portraits and self-portraits, in particular – a work of genius – the portrait of his friend, the writer and critic Max Herrmann-Neisse, of 1925 (in the Kunsthalle Mannheim).
Grosz made many pencil and charcoal sketches in preparation for this painting, which he worked on very carefully and slowly, according to his correspondence and the accounts of friends who visited his workshop. The result is a work that is both disconcerting and dazzling, a key element in his fiction: a little worm-like man, hunched up and getting smaller and smaller in front of our eyes. His bald head has shrunk almost to the top of the backrest of the chair, embroidered with red, blue and yellow flowers, where he is sitting. Very likely, if we kept watching him, he would carry on shrinking into a tiny figure, or even disappear, as in a fantasy story. His funeral garb, his large bony hands, the red ring on his finger, the slippers and gleaming bald head, his puckered mouth and blood-red lips, the way his head sinks into his curved chest: everything about him is strange, violates the norms, and yet at the same time there is something about this little gnome that we identify straight away, the inexorable life within him, perhaps the life of ideas, dreams and desires that inhabit his wretched body, or simply the life force that is his will to live, to defy the death that has already paid him a call and has begun to devour him. Grosz’s passion for macabre, grotesque and fantastic imagery can clearly be seen in this work, yet it does not lose its ‘realist’ appearance. This is one of the peculiarities of his art: it can be caught up in a mad flight of fantasy without ever departing from lived experience, without sinking into artifice or abstraction. Among the innumerable ‘monsters’ that emerged from Grosz’s pencils and brushes, few are as original and strange as this portrait.
During his years in Berlin, Grosz designed sets and costumes for several theatre productions, the most famous of which was the production staged by his friend Erwin Piscator, an adaptation of the Czech novel by Haroslav Jasek, The Good Soldier Schwejk. Along with supplying more than three hundred drawings for the cartoon film that Piscator used as a backcloth for the show – and which commented on, illustrated and, on occasion, took part in the action – Grosz, along with Bertolt Brecht, provided many ideas and suggestions for what would be remembered as one of the most memorable productions of the Weimar period. According to one critic, Grosz contributed above all else a sense of ‘ferocity’ as well as accentuating the anti-militarism of the piece.35 Although the film has been lost, there remain seventeen lithographs, based on drawings of the mise en scène that Grosz edited in 1928, with Malik, in a folder entitled Hintergrund. Among these is the drawing that caused a scandal and led to a long court case where Grosz was found guilty of blasphemy.
It is called Maul halten un weiter dienen (Close Your Mouth and Do Your Duty), and shows Christ on the cross with a gas mask and soldiers’ boots. One of his hands, raised aloft despite his bindings, is holding a black cross. Between his head and the inscription INRI is a shining halo. You can see his ribs through his skeletal body and in his side is the bleeding lance wound. The extreme weakness of the dying figure is shown in his buckling knees, no longer able to bear the weight of his fragile body. I have always been haunted by this small drawing. It is both terribly irreverent but also a savage plea for good sense and rationality to emerge from these depths of neglect and shame, an unadorned testimony to human suffering, not an act of blasphemy. Grosz detested romanticism, and in this period he always stated that one should accept life in all its cruel reality, without idealising it. ‘My opinion is th
at one should always have the courage to face up to the senselessness of everything that happens. The only sense in the world is the sense that one gives it. That for me, with a few nuances, is the domain of my art,’ he wrote to Wieland Herzfelde on 6 June 1933,36 a sentence that encapsulates his attitude towards art and life. But this picture shows how artistic creation cannot be controlled by reason alone, even in someone as reluctant to express ‘emotion’ as Grosz. For in that Christ in uniform, exposed to the horror of war in the trenches – the mud and mustard gas – who protests with the only thing that he has left to him– the human suffering inflicted on him by his killers – we see not just a provocative image but rather a moral allegory and a plea to society, to alienated men and women, to change direction. In the explosive conditions of extreme radicalisation that the Weimar Republic was experiencing in the final years of the decade, it would have been difficult for anyone to give such a pacifist and humanist reading of this Christ with his mask and boots, and it would not have been an interpretation that even Grosz would have accepted, because he was convinced that this was just another of his sacrilegious attacks on institutions and idols. That is perhaps the reason why, in 1930, he made a statue of this same image for an exhibition in Berlin organised by the IFA, the front organisation for the Communist Party. (The statue was confiscated by the police.) But, taken out of this radical context, this pathetic, alarming little figure has acquired an emotional and ethical resonance very different from how it was initially conceived. Something deeper and more permanent is now being expressed through it, with an energy and a subtlety that Grosz would only achieve on rare occasions.37
Although he continued working occasionally with the Communist Party, Grosz had stopped being an activist in 1925, and for some time, albeit discreetly, he had voiced his contempt and scepticism for the ‘masses’ and had openly rejected all forms of ‘collectivism’. In his autobiography, he states that his disillusionment with communism and Marxism began with his visit to the USSR, where he spent six months in 1922. He was there to do a book with the Danish writer Martin Andersen-Nexo (who ended up writing it on his own). The journey was eventful, full of colourful incidents. Grosz met a very sick Lenin in the Kremlin, along with a number of figures from the Revolution, including Bujarin, Lunacharsky and Radek, and he heard Trotsky speak. Grosz was at one point drawn to Constructivism, the art form that looked to embrace modern technology and industry and replace man by machines (or turn man into a machine). Constructivism was all the rage in Moscow, and Grosz offers an amusing sketch of the extravagant Tatlin, the mentor of that school, whom he visited in his ramshackle house full of balalaikas and chickens. But the chaotic state of the country, the hunger, the arrogance of the commissars, the signs of authoritarianism – and perhaps above all, his intuition of the absolute control that would be exercised over all aspects of society as the state, in the hands of the Party, began to spread its tentacles – revealed to him another side of that revolution that he and his left-wing friends in Berlin had viewed with so much hope. And they showed him that, however many gains they might achieve, in communist societies there would never be a place for iconoclastic and uncontrollable people like him. This journey, without doubt, began the process that, as happened with Orwell, would lead him to become as radically opposed to communism as he was to fascism.
But this was a gradual and somewhat tortuous process; when he got back to Berlin, and in the years immediately following his visit, he did not make public his negative impressions of the USSR, perhaps to keep his distance from the violent anti-Soviet sentiments of the conservatives and the Nazis, who were becoming increasingly numerous in German society, that he would continue to attack with the same vehemence as before. He stayed another three years in the party and even became the president of the recently formed Rote Gruppe (Red Group) of the Communist Union of German Artists in 1924. He contributed posters and drawings to the electoral campaigns of the party and until the end of the decade, with some strained moments, he remained a loyal ‘travelling companion’. In 1925 he published with Wieland Herzfelde Die Kunst ist in Gefahr (Art is in Danger), a collection of essays close to the aesthetic line of the Communist Party. There he argued that ‘the artist cannot ignore the laws of social development, which is now the class struggle’, and that painters had no other option but to choose between ‘displaying technique and propaganda and class struggle’. Luckily, when he came to paint and draw, Grosz did not take any account of his own ideas in favour of this ‘tendentious art’ and continued to follow, above all, his own impulses and deeper instincts. His art was ‘tendentious’ to the highest degree, of course, and his vision of social reality was absolutely dogmatic and Manichaean, but it was also individualist and arbitrary in a way that was completely incompatible with the teachings and propaganda that the Communist Party expected of its artists. In one court of law where he was being tried, Grosz declared in 1928: ‘When I am creating a drawing, I am not interested in any laws’.38 That’s true. Among these ‘laws’, of course, were his own political convictions. But when, in the intimacy of his studio in Sudende, these came up against his fantasy and his sense of unbridled freedom, it was fantasy and freedom that prevailed.
Some critics, including the well-informed Uwe M. Schneede, quote a letter that Grosz sent to his brother-in-law, Otto Schmalhausen, on 27 May 1927 as proof that his break with the revolution and the left could be due to financial considerations. ‘My plan (taking into account the advice of Flechtheim39) is the following: to painting a series of ‘commercial’ landscapes, avoiding causing offence. If I sell them, then, in the winter, I’ll be able to work on my favourite themes.’ But this implied criticism is not born out by the facts. It was precisely his most pugnacious and virulent paintings and drawings that brought him prestige among the most enlightened sectors of Weimar Germany’s bourgeoisie and aristocracy, who, like the elites of other European societies in the mad years of the inter-war period, discovered the refined pleasure of being artistically insulted, ill-treated and scandalised by Dadaists, Surrealists and revolutionaries of all complexions, and subscribed to their magazines and theatres, bought their paintings and went along happily to their shows. If its financial fate had depended on the proletariat, then all this rich literature and this splendid iconoclastic art in Europe at the beginning of the century would have vanished without trace. From this despised elite came the buyers and also Grosz’s backers, like the generous Doctor Felix J. Weil and Count Harry Kessler who, even in his most revolutionary moments, continued to help him economically, paying for trips and giving him a monthly income. It was this ferocious and insulting Grosz that the clientele admired, not the docile painter of landscapes that he did indeed begin to work on at the end of the twenties.
The evolution or, perhaps, the involution that Grosz’s work experienced, and which would continue after his move to the United States, is too profound and complex to be interpreted as a simple mercenary calculation which would also have been completely counterproductive, and would have undermined his artistic prestige. In any event, the fact is that when in 1930 he published, not with his communist friend Wielan Herzfelde’s publishing house, Malik Verlag, but with Bruno Cassirer, the sixty drawings of the series Über alles die Liebe (Love above All Else), something had changed in his world, even though outwardly all seemed to be the same. In his brief introduction to this work, Grosz says: ‘The devil will know why, but when one looks at them up close, people and things become inadequate, ugly and often ambiguous and senseless.’ However, in the watercolours and drawings of this collection, the reverse is true; people and things have become beautiful and more concrete. The world has lost its mystery, and objects and human beings seem to occupy firm and stable places in a world that has become static.
There are no demonic priests, and the few soldiers that crop up are not malevolent but seem instead cheerfully ridiculous. The bourgeois has softened his manners, and ladies have become much more decorous: they now play tennis, and when they are in dance
halls, in cafés, on walks and even in the bedroom, they no longer display their buttocks, their breasts and their vaginas to such an extent. As well as being more dressed than undressed, they are also less fat than before, and sometimes have slim bodies that show off to great effect the tailored coats and high-heeled shoes that are the dominant fashion of the day. Dandyism, hedonism, frivolity, snobbery and cunning have replaced the slashed throats, dismemberments, sadism, masochism and voyeurism. Politics and nightmares have disappeared, and sex, crime and assaults can only be glimpsed in the distance, remote grounds for muted fury and innocuous venom. There is a sense of general prosperity. Instead of cripples, beggars and unemployed people, the streets are full of friendly construction workers, and even the few remaining prostitutes, in their discreet brothels, are a bit like young society ladies. Instead of raping or killing them, gentlemen now kiss the ladies, sit them on their knees and talk to them like equals. Naughty old buffers spy on maids, as in popular farces. Evil, cruelty and violence have fled the fictive world of Grosz and their place has been taken by irony, humour, conformity, understanding and benevolence.
Just as his fictional world was transformed, so his life became radically different when he travelled to the United States. It was a childhood dream and a political necessity. He travelled just in time, since eighteen days after his departure, on 30 January, Hitler came to power. Few artists were as detested by the Nazis, and for good reason. In his last year in Berlin a group of brown shirts came to his studio in Berlin. He was saved by his acting ability: the thugs went away thinking that he was the butler. In the famous inquisitorial fire of 10 May 1933 at the gates of the University of Humboldt, the forty odd books that he illustrated as well as his own books became fuel for the flames. Five oils – including the portrait of Max Herman-Neisse – two watercolours and thirteen prints were included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition organised by Goebbels and exhibited throughout Germany to show how obscene, sacrilegious, anti-patriotic, pro-Jewish and pro-Bolshevik ‘modernist’ art was (and, indeed all these adjectives applied to Grosz). The regime’s attack on his work was systematic and savage. Max Pechstein calculates that 285 works by Grosz disappeared or were destroyed by the Nazis. In March 1938 they took away his German nationality and, as they had nothing left of him to attack, they seized his wife’s few possessions. Grosz had already decided that he would, ‘along with his citizenship, discard his German identity, as if it were an old coat’. (He says this in his autobiography.) That year, he was given US nationality.
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