by Ian Buruma
Grosz knew very well that he would never be an American artist. But he also knew there was no way back to the Berlin he had left behind. Like so many other émigré artists, he was caught between worlds. “Life here,” he wrote in 1936, “is so different, and sometimes one feels so depressed and uncomfortable—but then a cool ocean breeze comes blowing round the corner—and one is an American once again: how are’ye—how are’ya doin’—just fine, just fein!”9
The sadness of Grosz in America is not only that his roles were of another place and another time but that they were not understood. He tried to revive his image as the Dada clown in a famous collage he made in 1957. It shows the artist’s face, in clown’s makeup, on the body of a showgirl, with Manhattan in the background. In his left hand, Grosz, “der Clown von New York,” carries a bottle of bourbon.
In May of that same year, Grosz gave a speech in New York, after receiving the gold medal for graphic arts from the American Academy of Arts and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The speech, published in the catalog, is a distressing document. He tells the audience how moved he is by this token of recognition. And he tries to explain his artistic philosophy. It is a spirited defense of figurative art in an age of abstract expressionism. He describes the limitations of satire and explains his desire to be an artist of nature. It is a cry from the heart, a desperate apologia pro vita sua, but the audience thinks he is clowning and interrupts his speech with howls of laughter. As the audience howls, he begins to dance around the microphone, like a mad Indian. Pegeen Sullivan, Grosz’s dealer in New York, cried with embarrassment. But the painter Jack Levine thought the spectacle was just great—a Dada happening straight from the Weimar Republic.
Oh, spiffing world, oh funfair,
Blessed freakshow,
Watch out! Here comes Grosz,
The saddest man in Europe,
“A phenomenon of sadness.”
Stiff hat in the back of the neck,
No slouch!!!!
Nigger songs in the skull,
Colorful as fields of hyacinths,
Or turbulent D-trains,
Clattering across rattling bridges
Ragtime dancers,
At the fence, waiting in the crowd,
For Rob. E. Lee.
—GEORGE GROSZ10
Grosz’s American dream came to him very early on. As a small boy in a garrison town in Pomerania, where his mother ran the officers’ mess, he read American stories about Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter. And like every German boy (still), he read Karl May’s Wild West novels about Old Shatterhand, the German-American hero, and his loyal Indian friend Winnetou. He also loved James Fenimore Cooper’s stories, which earned him one of his many nicknames, “Leatherstocking.”
Barnum and Bailey’s circus, complete with General Tom Thumb in full dress uniform, came to town. Then there were those fabled men who had tried their luck in the US, and come back to visit the old country, impressing the young Grosz with their padded shoulders, patent-leather shoes, and easy manners. America was a fantasy land of wild adventures, fabulous riches, cowboys and Indians, wide-open spaces. One can still taste the atmosphere of these turn-of-the-century German-American dreams in May’s old house, now a museum, in a suburb of Dresden. “Villa Shatterhand” is stuffed with Western paraphernalia: Indian headdresses, trapper’s hats, Colts, Henry rifles, and bad oil paintings of life on the prairies. When May wrote his tales of the Wild West, he had never set foot in America.
In 1916, like his friend and fellow Dadaist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld), Grosz chose to Anglicize his given name when he signed his drawings for Berlin magazines. This was a gesture of contempt for the anti-British and anti-American propaganda of World War I. But Grosz’s Americanism was also one of his many public poses. In true Dadaist fashion, the posing was part of his art. Like Karl May (not, I hasten to say, a Dadaist), he liked to be photographed in different guises: as an American gangster brandishing a revolver, or as a boxer, or as a kind of Mack the Knife, about to stab his wife with a dagger.
One of his drawings of 1916 was titled Picture of Texas for My Friend Chingachgook, a picture of squinting, corncob-pipe-smoking horsemen and an imperturbable Indian. There is also a magnificent drawing of New York City called Memory of New York, a crazy jumble of skyscrapers, elevated trains, and neon signs. Of course, Grosz had no memories of New York, any more than James Fenimore Cooper’s fabled Indian was his friend. These were part of his elaborate fantasies. He liked to present himself as George Grosz, the American artist, or, on occasion, as “Dr. William King Thomas,” American doctor and mass murderer—this was when he wasn’t pretending to be a Dutch businessman or a Prussian aristocrat. One of his poems begins with the line: “I shoot off my gun, early, when I step out of my log cabin.” There was a picture on the wall of his studio of Henry Ford, with the inscription (written by Grosz himself): “To George Grosz, the artist, from his admirer, Henry Ford.”
Childish stuff. But Grosz was not the only one with such dreams. America was in the Berlin air, like the shimmy, the “nigger songs,” and the jazz music of Mr. Meshugge and his band, playing at the Cafe Oranienburger Tor. Thomas Mann called Berlin the “Prussian-American metropolis.” Even Bertolt Brecht, who was hardly an admirer of Yankee capitalism, fantasized about America. (Grosz much admired Brecht’s American-style suits.) But just as Brecht’s song about whiskey bars and the moon of Alabama belongs to Berlin, not the actual US, Grosz’s drawings of Manhattan skyscrapers and Texas saloons fit with his other work in Germany. They are German in a way that his later allegories about the European apocalypse were never part of the American scene. Grosz, “the American artist,” was German in the way the Rolling Stones are British, even, or perhaps especially, when they imitate Americans.
Wieland Herzfelde shrewdly described Grosz’s American poses and drawings as “a kind of satire of his own wishful dreams.”11 This, too, is not unlike European rock stars singing about Memphis, Tennessee, in exaggerated, shit-kicking style. Someone should write a book one day about the American fantasies that are part of European popular culture. Grosz would merit a major chapter. Then, barely a decade after Grosz’s death, American pop culture repaid the compliment by turning pre-war Berlin into an erotic fetish: “Life is a cabaret, old chum,” and so on.
Love and ridicule, like lust and loathing, are always close together in Grosz’s work. In an essay that established Grosz’s name in Berlin, the writer Theodor Däubler wrote that Grosz was “never elegiac: out of his cowboy-romanticism, and his longing for skyscrapers, he created a perfectly real Wild West in Berlin.”12 Perhaps this is why these drawings are convincing, whereas the oil paintings of his nightmares in New York are not. In 1916, he tried to make his American fantasies look real, not real in the photographic sense but concrete, palpable, as though sketched from life.
Even his most allegorical works of the Berlin period are full of beautifully observed details. Pillars of Society (1926) is a good example. One of the four pillars of the Weimar Republic is the porcine priest, blindly preaching as the buildings burn and the soldiers rampage behind him. The other three are the journalist, with a bedpan on his head; the politician, with a pile of steaming shit instead of a brain; and the monocled military officer, with the tin-pot mirage of a Wilhelminian cavalry officer emerging from his empty skull. The message of the painting is as unambiguous as, say, a 1960s protest song by Bob Dylan. But that is not what makes it a work of art. It is the details that count: the stiff white collars, the mustaches, the marble-topped café table, the duel-scarred cheeks.
Hans Sahl recalls meeting Grosz after the war, at an exhibition of the work of Edvard Munch, in Munich. Grosz, sporting a monocle, was loudly denouncing Munch for the sloppy way he painted clothes. “A great painter,” he said to Sahl, “must also be a great tailor. He must know how to make shirts, gloves, ties, walking sticks.”13 Grosz knew what he was talking about. He was always fastidious, in his work and about his personal appearance. There is a small
drawing, made in 1917, of a man washing the blood off his hands, after having severed the head of his female victim with an ax. There is a curious fussiness about the scene: the woman’s lace-up shoes neatly placed under the bed, the killer’s pocket watch laid on the table, and his jacket and cane, carefully folded and tidied away. This murderer knew how to take care of himself.
Grosz was a dandy. He liked to sit alone at the Café des Westens, powdered and rouged, dressed in a chocolate-brown suit, his cane, topped with an ivory skull, beside him. He affected the detachment of the dandy, the contempt for the bourgeois world, particularly the world of the German bourgeois, the Spiesser. Wolfgang Cillessen remarks in his catalog essay that Grosz needed the contrast of German ugliness to set off his own cultivated elegance. Grosz: “To be German is always to be tasteless, stupid, ugly, fat, stiff; to be unable, at the age of forty, to climb a ladder, to be badly dressed. To be German means to be a reactionary of the worst kind; it means that of a hundred people, only one will keep his whole body clean.”14
But Grosz was not as detached as all that. Nor was he just a preacher against German depravity, even though another one of his roles was that of the moralist. There is a self-portrait of Grosz posing as a stern German schoolmaster, pointing a warning finger. It is entitled Self-Portrait as a Warner (1927). A moralist cannot be completely detached. True dandies don’t warn, they just display their style. But Grosz had, in Cillessen’s happy phrase, a “voluptuous fascination” with the objects of his scorn. This is what made him such a master of satire, a true disciple of Hogarth, whom Grosz so much admired. Berlin of the 1920s may have been vulgar, grasping, heartless, and full of Spiesser, but it was sexy, too. For some, some of the time, life was indeed a cabaret. Even the Spiesser, in a crude, swinish way, were sexy. It was that sexiness that Grosz managed to capture in many of his drawings.
Take his pictures of brothels, with their thick, leering customers pawing and tickling half-dressed whores. There is an element of loathing in these drawings and watercolors, maybe even of warning. But also of voluptuous fascination. The way his artist’s eye undresses women in the streets, and sees through the walls of tenement buildings, is meant to expose the hypocrisy of bourgeois city life, the filth behind the respectable façade, but it is also a form of voyeurism, of delight in what his X-ray view reveals. What is true of whores and pimps is true of the beery men at their regular café tables, or the fat, complacent bourgeois families, sitting around pianos or Christmas trees, or even of the grotesque priests and hideous bankers: this was Grosz’s world. He knew it intimately. He was part of it. He was—as he admits in his autobiography—a bit of a Spiesser himself.
Grosz was a political artist in the sense that he used his art as a polemical weapon. But he was an agitator more than a propagandist, a moralist more than a political thinker. He joined the German Communist Party, but began to lose faith in progress and the proletarian revolution by the early 1920s—a trip in 1922 to the USSR didn’t help. By the time he left for the US, he had lost it completely. He once said that the larger the crowd he went with, the more of an individualist he became. Brecht recognized this, and never saw Grosz as a reliable Party man. Grosz was not so much in favor of communism, or social democracy, as against the smug, fat face of German authority. This suited his Communist friends, editors, and publishers fine.
Grosz lost faith not only in communism but also in the efficacy of political art. In his autobiography, he wrote that he “had gradually come to see that the propaganda value of art had been highly overrated, that politically committed artists mistook its effects on themselves for the reaction of the ‘beloved proletarian masses.’ ”15 He still did marvelous drawings, watercolors, and some paintings after 1923, but nothing, in my view, ever reached the savage beauty of his Ecce Homo collection, or the malice of the “lavatory graffiti” drawings of 1916 and 1917. He later considered satire a minor art, but it was there, and not in his attempts at fine art, that he excelled. He lifted the art of shocking the bourgeois to a level of greatness.
At his best, he was so good that his pictures still have the power to shock. Pausing at the Nationalgalerie in front of some drawings made in 1921, I overheard a conversation between three Germans, all aged around sixty: two paunchy men and a woman in a green felt hat. Looking at a picture of obese, cigar-smoking worthies, who were wearing chamber pots on their heads, the woman said, “Revolting!” Her friends agreed. One of the men boomed that he couldn’t understand “this nonsense about Spiesser, as though everyone who is normal and decent were a Spiesser.” “Quite so,” said the other man just as loudly, “quite so.” Then, suddenly, he was struck by a thought: Was Grosz a Jew? “No, no,” said his friend, “no, no, not a Jew, no, no, not that.”
Grosz began to realize in the US “that caricatures are prized chiefly in periods of cultural decline, that life and death are too fundamental to be subjects of mockery and cheap jibes.”16 This is a little too disparaging of the satirist’s art, but Grosz was right about the last part. The Third Reich was not a laughing matter. For satire to work, or indeed to be possible at all, a certain amount of political and social freedom is needed. And people have to be shockable. The Weimar Republic, with its veneer of bourgeois respectability, its free press, its licentiousness, its greed, and its bumbling politicians, was a perfect target for wicked mockery. As the radical journalist Kurt Tucholsky said, “It is crying out for satire.”
But when the Spiesser turn into killers, there is not much a satirist can do, for there is no one left to shock. The reality of Hitler’s Germany was more shocking than any lampoon could be. Grosz did his best in his allegorical paintings, but he failed, because that was not his style, and because the real thing was too overwhelming. His Berlin had already begun to disintegrate some years before he left Germany. By 1930, the Weimar Republic was tottering. A week after Grosz arrived for the second time in New York, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The republic that had filled Grosz with such voluptuous loathing was gone. In 1946, he looked back on the earliest years of his career with nostalgia:
Yes, I loved Dresden. It was a good, romantic time. And after that, Berlin. My god, the air was full of stimulation. It was lovely to sit at the Café Josty. The old and new Sezession. It’s all gone. Only dust remains. Tree stumps, filth, hunger and cold. We, who still experienced the “old,” or at least the last years of Wilhelminian civilization, can compare, and the comparison, I’m afraid, does not favor our own time. (Letter to Herbert Fiedler, February 1946)
Grosz had never really wished to go back. But his wife wanted to live in Germany again. And so it was that a week after his sad speech and Indian dance at the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1959, they returned to Berlin. Grosz was surprised at how American the city had become. He also found life slower and more relaxed: “One feels that of every 100 Berliners, 101 are pensioners.” He sent a postcard to Rosina Florio, the director of the Art Students League, begging her to ask him back to New York. She was on holiday when the card arrived. By the time she read it, Grosz was dead. After a night of heavy drinking, he had choked on his own vomit.
1 George Grosz, Briefe: 1913–1959 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1979), p. 148.
2 Grosz, Briefe, p. 163.
3 “George Grosz: Berlin–New York,” an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, December 21, 1994–April 17, 1995; and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, May 6–June 30, 1995. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Peter-Klaus Schuster (Berlin: Neue Nationalgalerie/Ars Nicolai, 1994).
4 Grosz, Briefe, p. 174.
5 All the above quotes are from Grosz’s autobiography, A Small Yes and a Big No, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans (Allison and Busby, 1982), p. 184.
6 Hans Sahl, So Long mit Händedruck (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1993), p. 15.
7 A Small Yes and a Big No, p. 184.
8 Grosz, Briefe, p. 375.
9 Grosz, Briefe, p. 230.
10 In Pass Auf! Hier Kommt Grosz: Bilder Rythmen und Gesänge 1915–1918 (Leipz
ig: Verlag Philipp Reclam Junior, 1981).
11 Pass Auf! Hier Kommt Grosz, p. 76.
12 This essay appeared in 1916, in a magazine called Die weissen Blätter, an internationalist journal that discovered Franz Kafka.
13 Sahl, So Long mit Händedruck, p. 20.
14 Quoted in the catalog, p. 270.
15 A Small Yes and a Big No, p. 189.
16 A Small Yes and a Big No, p. 185.
24
MR. NATURAL
THE TYPICAL CRUMB flavor—wild, sardonic, and exuberant—is exemplified by a little picture story reprinted in the Handbook,1 entitled “The Adventures of R. Crumb Himself.” It shows the hero going for a walk downtown, coming across the National School of Hard Knocks. He enters the establishment, gets kicked by a mother superior, beaten by a policeman, stomped on by a professor, and just as the nun is about to chop off his penis with an ax, he chops off her head instead. Buying a bomb from a sinister man in a dark ally, Crumb then blows up the School of Hard Knocks and enrolls in a different place called the National School of Hard Knockers, a nubile girl on each arm, his penis hardening, mouth drooling: “So I’m a male chauvinist pig.… Nobody’s perfect … R. Crumb—”
Crumb comics are often very funny, inventive, full of dark fantasies, aggression, and a certain degree of tenderness. Does this make him “the Brueghel of the last half of the twentieth century,” as Robert Hughes, the art critic, claims?2 Paul Morris, of the Paul Morris Gallery in New York, also includes Louise Bourgeois in a list of artists whose works, in his view, “have a relationship” with Crumb’s. These comparisons show how much the barriers between so-called fine art and popular art have come down. The best of the comic strips are now shown on museum and gallery walls. As I write this article, the work of nine American cartoonists, including Crumb, is on display at the Pratt Gallery in New York. And Crumb has had shows in several European museums.