George Grosz
 |
WHEN GEORGE GROSZ stepped off the boat in New York on a hot spring day in 1932, he was already a famous German caricaturist. He had been born at Stolp in 1893, trained in the rigorous academies of Dresden and Berlin, and had just reached maturity at the time of the first World War. Hating the army, in which he served twice, bitterly disillusioned by the moral decay of post-war Berlin, Grosz had been drawn, almost against his will, into the biting social satire which won him an international reputation and eventually the active disapproval of the Nazis.
His reaction to America was totally unexpected. He felt as if an oppressive weight had been lifted from his spirits, as if he had escaped into a miraculously sane and normal world. To the disappointment of many critics who were waiting to see what his acid pen would do with American foibles, he gave up caricature and turned, instead, to watercolors of the city, soon followed by landscapes, baroque still lifes and creamy nudes painted in flowing, Rubensesque lines. Outwardly he has lived the uneventful life of a Long Island suburbanite, first at Bayside until 1936, for the next ten years at Douglaston, since then at Huntington. In 1938 he became an American citizen.
But from the beginning there was, as Grosz puts it, "a certain horror in me"--a dark foreboding of disaster which was realized when the second World War finally overwhelmed Europe. Unbidden, his mind and then his brush began to dwell on the senseless destruction, the brutality, the mass murder invoked by the dictators. The pictures that resulted were powerful symbols of the artist's despair for humanity. Sometimes they grew out of personal associations. The Survivor was suggested by thoughts of Grosz's brother-in-law, who was in the German army despite his age, though the concept changed as he worked, into that of a still older man who fights on alone and senselessly because there is nothing else to do. More often his pictures were purely symbolic. The Pit unites, in one swirling, baroque pattern, figures which are vivid embodiments of hunger, madness, prostitution, drunkenness, political chicanery, death and a bloody Europe. It is a kind of modern world apocalypse. In still another vein, Grosz created a legendary gray world peopled by his fanatical "stickmen"--a half-insect, predatory tribe that attacks everything human and waves its flag defiantly at the rest of mankind. These paintings are very different from the early Grosz caricatures and even more so from the nudes and landscapes which he was doing at the same time. In their own Gothic, terror-haunted way they are perhaps the most powerful anti-war pictures of our times.
Grosz: "Take your brush and start in." This maxim, attributed to old Rembrandt, isn't always easy to adhere to, especially in 1953. One could, perhaps, define this as an ice or metal age of art--an age in which an international freezing or metallizing process has appeared. Somewhere along the way the center was lost and the human element left behind.
Demons, horrors, storms of wrath (hate), naked violence, humiliation, and complete senselessness left their marks on my outlook. I tried to sublimate these impressions into many hundreds of drawings, watercolors, and later, paintings. I admired Strindberg and often felt that his "Inferno" had become a reality. And when the sulphuric fumes cleared away my thoughts returned to nature. I like to work with nature; when I do, I become balanced and peaceful. I had great pleasure in recognition, which is why I like to paint recognizable objects.
|
||
This website is created and designed by Atlantis International, 2006
This is an unofficial website with educational purpose. All pictures, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and may not be reproduced for any reason whatsoever. If proper notation of owned material is not given please notify us so we can make adjustments. No copyright infringement is intended.
