February 13, 2019
“It’s an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing ‘art’ to defend their collapsing culture.” George Grosz
Down the street from where I went to law school used to be a rare-book store, some steps down into a daylight basement. They sold prints as well and it was there where I first encountered George Grosz. I had no clue who he was, or how his work was anchored in yet another period of horrid German history. I was 18 and just starting to wake up to political reality. I also had no money to buy a print, which is probably why I remember this whole episode in the first place, since I was overwhelmed by what I saw, coveted it and couldn’t have it. It was different from anything I had been exposed to before.
You can see the original Faith Healers at MOMA. The KV stands for KriegsVerwendungsfähig which is usually translated as fit for active service; the literal translation is: usable for war.
Grosz’ experience with the horrors of war as a soldier in WW I made him a committed pacifist. He became intensely involved in subversive art and social critique, became a political activist and documented the upheaval of the 1920s in Germany. Hannah Arendt called his drawings “reportage.” He was dragged into court multiple times over accusations of agitation against the state, or blasphemy, and eventually escaped the rise of Hitler and his minions by moving to the States.
The man who had been a principal member of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, co-founder of DADA, who collaborated with John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann in the invention of photomontage (!), did not fare too well as an emigrant. The revolutionary spirit was subdued – “You come from another country you don’t start right away criticizing – they took you in.”
His art which had so brilliantly subverted the bourgeois style and content, turned into landscape painting and still life, with the occasional apocalyptic sheen. I almost spilled my coffee when I read in the Brittanica that his art became “less misanthropic…” He lived and taught on Long Island, still enamored with the country that took him in, but also clearly suffering the consequences of displacement.
In 1958 he returned to Germany, and died a short time later in an inexplicable fall down a staircase.
Here is a 1 page, kind of graphic-novel biography told by his son to a journalist – https://www.thenation.com/article/george-grosz-a-biography-of-the-political-artist/
Until mid-July you can see some of his works at the Tate Modern in their Magic Realism – Art in Weimar Germany 1919-1933 exhibition. In case you, like I, didn’t know either: the term Magic Realism, for me always linked to South American literature, was actually invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects. Hah, not a day without learning something new. Lusting for a London trip…..
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/magic-realism
For music today go to this website and click on the arrow in the black box offering different titles. It is a compilation of music from the Weimar Republic.
Photographs today are street art from Berlin, his hometown.
PS: In the title photograph of today’s blog you can see half a bedbug and a sign below that reads: Vor der Mauer, nach der Mauer , schickt der Staat die Wanzen. – This is a wordplay on an old nursery rhyme: Auf der Mauer, auf der Lauer, liegt ‘ne kleine Wanze, roughly translated: On the wall lies a bedbug in wait to bug you. The wordplay: Before the wall, after the wall, the state sends bugs to bug you.
