Theater of Cruelty (44 page)

It is interesting to compare Grosz’s attempts to be conventional with the work of his contemporary Otto Dix. Dix, too, was at his best when he was most disgusting: the carnage in World War I, the filthy old whores in cheap Berlin brothels. When Dix painted “beautifully”—portraits of his wife and children, for example—he became cloying, kitschy, a Christmas-card artist. Both Dix and Grosz needed the stimulation of their loathing to produce their best work. Loathing was the one thing Grosz did not feel in America; he didn’t want to feel it; he couldn’t afford to feel it. Loathing is what he had wished to leave behind.

But it didn’t quite work out that way. Despite his eagerness to please the American glossies, Grosz was still Grosz, haunted by dark visions and suffering severe depressions. A drink was never far from his side. Some of his letters read like the ravings of a brilliant drunk. And some of the American paintings are among the darkest, most horrific things he ever made. They are depressing in a way that even his most grotesque Berlin drawings never were. In a painting entitled
The Moon has set, and the Pleiades
(1944), a tired figure (the artist himself) trudges through the mud during a nocturnal rainstorm. He looks battered, bloody, without hope. A drawing called
Shattered Dream
(1935) shows a man slumped over a rock, a broken glass in one hand, a bottle, leaking booze, in the other. He looks as if he has
just been sick. Immediately behind him is the wreckage of a boat, with the shattered remains of a cross, a paintbrush, and a book. Farther behind him is a city in ruins, and farther still the mirage of Manhattan skyscrapers.

The feeling of personal despair that went into these paintings was shared by many, perhaps most, émigrés and refugees cast adrift in a strange and indifferent new world. Grosz was onto something real and interesting. And yet the paintings lack the power of his earlier work. They seem rhetorical, unconvincing, without life. The same is true, in my view, of his allegorical paintings of the European catastrophe. Here Grosz modeled himself not on Rubens or Brueghel but on Goya and Bosch. In
God of War
(1940), Mars is represented as a demonic Nazi, surrounded by the symbolic paraphernalia of contemporary horror: a swastika, the head of a tortured man, a child playing with a machine gun. In
The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets
(1942), we see Hitler standing in an icy landscape, holding a bloody whip behind his back, like the tail of Beelzebub. The two poets, one playing on a broken lyre, the other scribbling on bits of torn paper adorned with swastikas, are monstrous old graybeards worshiping at the knees of the Führer. Then there is his most famous painting, entitled
Cain, or Hitler in Hell
(1944), which—like many of his paintings—is composed from elements of older drawings. Hitler is depicted as a haunted figure, mopping the sweat off his brow, sitting on a heap of corpses, as the world is bubbling and burning in the background like a hellish cauldron.

The subjects of these paintings were no doubt deeply felt, and the imagery is horrific enough. But they refuse to come to life. What is depicted not only lacks realism (as is only natural in allegories) but reality. Grosz wrote in 1946 (to Elisabeth Lindner) that he was not especially interested in representing “reality.” There was no reason for his “nightmares to compete with photography. They are witnesses
of my ‘inner’ world—ruins in me, populated by my own lunatics, dwarfs and wizards.”
⁸
Other denizens of Grosz’s inner world are the “stick people,” figures made up of nerves and intestines, who are, in the artist’s words, “without any hope or purpose,” moving about grotesquely in a kind of danse macabre.

The problem with these allegories is the problem of his “commercial” landscapes: the
détails
are missing, the small things of daily life, recreated by the artist, that make the work more than just painted rhetoric. The nightmares lack immediacy because they are not observed, and Grosz, I think, needed to observe closely what he painted. He was not comparable to Goya, or even to Max Beckmann, who painted marvelously wherever he was, in Berlin, Amsterdam, or St. Louis. Grosz’s inner life was not enough to feed his art. He needed the buzz and the smell of the streets. And not just any streets but the streets he knew best, of late Wilhelminian, early Republican Berlin, where he could play the dandy, the agent provocateur, the Dadaist clown. It was hard for him to play these roles in New York. As he said in an interview quoted by Christine Fischer-Defoy in the exhibition catalog: “I became kind of conformist in America. I didn’t want to stand out.”

Here, too, Grosz was probably exaggerating. For he never stopped playacting—his autobiography, written in 1946, is a hilarious but very unreliable document. His roles were getting increasingly stale, however. They belonged to a vanished world. He had frequented the Dada group in Berlin during World War I, and his wonderfully zany Dadaist sense of humor still permeates his letters to fellow exiles, who shared the same memories and understood his jokes. In these letters, written in an inimitable and untranslatable mixture of American English and Berlin slang, one can still sense the afterglow of the
Weimar Republic. But reading them, I could not help thinking of the shattered dandyism of Beau Brummell and his friends, who tried to keep up appearances in shabby French seaports after being thrown out of the salons of Regency London. The demented Brummell would hold imaginary soirées in empty hotel rooms.

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.

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.