DAUMIER OF OUR TIME
Werner, Alfred
Daumier of Our Time by Alfred Werner T HE TRAGIC ARTIST in history or imagination is a harassed man of genius, unrecognized by the critics, unable to sell his work, too poor to support his...
...Can one recapture one's youth, even by the most emphatic effort...
...Yet the critics were overly kind to him, and so great was his reputation among the patrons that even inferior work of his later years would sell for thousands of dollars as long as the signature, "Grosz," was genuine...
...His articles on art have appeared in a score of publications including Commentary, The American Scholar, The Saturday Review, and The Chicago Jewish Forum, of which he is an associate editor...
...This statement reveals that he had not really lost them...
...In 1920 the Reichswehr caused his arrest...
...However disappointing Grosz may have been in his middle years and old age, it is impossible to forget or ignore the splendid works of his youth: small in size, yet every inch filled with Daumier's wit and Goya's anger...
...The early Grosz was an ardent fighter who used his unerring pencil or pen to attack the ills of society as Daumier had done, and before him Hogarth, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, and Goya...
...In his suburban villa Grosz found the peace and happiness he had not known for years...
...Throughout the war he expressed his abhorrence of the military machine and civilian corruption by means of sharp, hard drawings that captured a situation and summed up an idea in a few crisp, meaningful lines...
...To a friend he confided, "Since I came to America, I have lost all my values...
...Grosz continued to draw his caricatures of Nazis and war-mongers, although he knew that his very life was threatened by political mobsters, eager to destroy this "detractor of German greatness...
...Grosz, as an artist, was fully aware of the prostitutes, rakes, swindlers, adventurers, and lechers, but he was more concerned about the sinister powers that permitted such a large variety of evils to thrive, and exposed them in portfolios of merciless lithographs...
...The man whose drawings had had the power of hand-grenades surrendered to the slickness of magazine cover art...
...In his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No, he repeatedly refers to his very fertile 1914-1918 period: "At every opportunity I would express my disillusionment in small drawings...
...This was particularly true of his garishly pigmented oils (in his drawings he still retained some of his strength...
...But none of them contained a single contribution by Grosz...
...Grosz had the rare gift of what might be called aggressive vision...
...Grosz disowned his past, said that he never wanted to become a caricaturist, and that his hopes never lay with the masses (although the work he had done before his fortieth year tells a different story...
...Why do artists often seem preoccupied with "unpleasant" and "macabre" sights...
...Why do they not confine themselves to works that "uplift" man...
...So great was his uncritical infatuation with America that he completely overlooked all the perils threatening the survival of her democracy like the Depression, the fascist groups of the Thirties, and McGarthyism...
...In the Twenties he was the leading spirit in a movement, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and pursued social criticism with a blending of truculent realism and ironic humor...
...He knew that he had become "commercial," and in consequence suffered terribly from his own artistic decline, vainly trying to find solace in liquor, behaving like a madman during alcoholic excesses...
...With a seemingly scratchy and careless, yet actually knowledgeable and deliberate line, and in a completely unorthodox "perspective," he penetrated facades, unearthing social and political depravity...
...The judge who wrote the opinion even defended the artist who had "made himself the spokesman of millions who disavow war...
...Georg" became "George," a conformist (in every respect) in an America that spoiled and pampered the celebrated refugee from Nazi oppression...
...In the next year the Nazis marched into the Reichstag as Germany's second largest party, and the men of the Right began to take the law into their own hands rather than to rely on decisions of the courts...
...The men who founded Neue Sacklichkeit about 1923 were neither tranquil nor serene...
...Whether West German art is abstract or mildly representational, there is a striking and puzzling serenity and tranquility about most of it, indicative of full acceptance of the status quo...
...Hundreds of his works were confiscated by the Nazis, some were destroyed, while others were included in a "Degenerate Art" Exhibition...
...He was 65 when he returned to Berlin last spring...
...Had he lived, would he have succeeded in retracing his steps and finding himself...
...This decision was written in 1929...
...An old friend summed up Grosz' affliction: "His stature as an artist would have loomed larger rather than smaller, had he died in 1933...
...In pre-Hitler Germany, quite a few artists did not like what they saw, and fearlessly expressed their political and social convictions in aesthetically superior work...
...And is the Bonn Republic a place where satire can thrive...
...Once in a long while he might return to one of his earlier subjects—like the horrors of war—but would be less convincing than before: gone was the orginality, gone the celebrated economy of line...
...He accepted, came to the United States, and fell in love with America (which, wherever he went, gave him the red-carpet treatment...
...We did not see who fed the flames . . . An explosion was imminent...
...They were angry young men who expressed their disgust in firm line and virile color rather than in a Bohemian way of life...
...They realized that the men of Weimar had promulgated excellent laws, but that most o? the administrators were conservatives who would have preferred their Kaiser and who did everything possible to frustrate the republicans' attempts to turn Germany into a modern, humanistic state, worthy of the "nation of poets and thinkers" the Germans once had aspired to be...
...The streets became dangerous and were markets for prostitution, murder, and cocaine deals . . . The world of the 1920's was like a boiling cauldron...
...In all likelihood more Germans hated Grosz than loved him...
...I am inclined to doubt it...
...But those discontented souls who refused to accept conditions as they were rallied in support of what the American painter, Mars-den Hartley, characterized as "scalpellike incisions into the coarse flesh-crust of obtuse and vulgar humanity...
...I have found a little lampooning of sacred cows in its small literary cabarets, less in the rather tame satirical weeklies (the Simplizissimus of Munich is only a ghostly revival of the brilliantly sharp paper of Thomas Theodor Heine), and next to nothing in the realm of fine art...
...Can one "return to a dream...
...Emigrant journals, exposing and assailing Nazism, appeared everywhere in the Free World...
...Between 1910 and that fatal year, 1933, Grosz was the outstanding caricaturist and satirist of Central Europe, hated by chauvinists and reactionaries, adored by those who believed in an anti-militaristic, truly democratic Germany...
...the artist was tried and fined 5,000 marks...
...The simple answer is that a large number of artists cannot shut their eyes against the misery of their fellow men and are compelled by conscience to use their skills for the improvement of society...
...He died recently at the age of 65, mourned by his family, by the United States which had awarded him the Gold Medal of the Academy of Arts and Letters just a week before his return to his native Germany, and by the Bonn Republic where, after his long exile in New York, he hoped to find new inspiration...
...Fined on account of two lithographs contained in a portfolio (one showed Christ in a gas mask, the other a German pastor balancing a cross on his nose), the artist appealed to a higher court and the conviction was reversed...
...Grosz and his friends who shunned the Expressionist group were candid and bitter...
...Berlin, where Grosz lived, was a sordid place to those who, like him, discerned the corrupt core beneath the gay surface of dancing, singing, and love-making: "All this appeared to be very merry, but beneath all was hate and despair . . . Barbarism prevailed...
...He developed in defiance of his milieu...
...Yet those who had known the artist also knew that in all the rather carefree years he spent in America (from the winter of 1933 to the late spring of 1959) he was a tortured soul, seeking an anodyne in huge quantities of alcohol...
...Flowers, weeds, birds, rocks, water, and sun and the big moon speak more to me than before and are often more familiar than the faces of human beings...
...Those whom he attacked, retaliated...
...But from the third brush with the law he emerged victorious...
...Everything I disliked in my environment I would sketch in my notebook or on sheets of writing paper: there were the beastly faces of my comrades, war cripples, arrogant officers, embittered nurses...
...We who admired Grosz were happy, indeed, upon learning that he had escaped in time, for had he remained in Germany he might have been tortured to death in a concentration camp...
...He endeavored to gain artistic knowledge outside the conservative Dresden Academy, chose his friends among like-minded rebels (the painter Jules Pascin was one of them), and came to admire August Bebel, leader of the Social Democratic Party...
...Georg Grosz belonged in this category...
...What saddened his admirers, who knew him as a fighter in the Twenties, was not so much the change of subject matter as the rapid decline of his artistic faculties...
...Hitler was able to kill off his opposition, or to drive it into an underground where its activities were of small danger to his regime, but anti-Nazi sentiments continued to flourish in Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France, and England...
...His case clearly shows the clanger besetting an artist in transplantation from one culture to another...
...Superficially, his was a happy and successful life...
...Grosz spent much of his youth in an officers' club run by his parents, devout Lutherans and pa-triotic Prussians...
...When World War I erupted, Grosz, then 21, enlisted in the infantry, but his military career was neither glorious nor of long duration, for early in 1916 he was discharged after a brain fever...
...It is sad to reflect that nothing comparable to Neue Sachlichkeit has come into existence anywhere in the past two decades...
...With the writer Heinrich Mann and the composer Kurt Weill (to whom he is spiritually related), Grosz belonged to those exiles who, in the New World, with their fires burnt out, were unable to repeat the glorious feats of yesterday...
...His latest credo was summed up in these words: "Satirical drawings of which I made thousands in earlier days, no longer hold much importance for me...
...One must go to the early work of Grosz in order to see, through an artist's eye, the cruel reality, half-hidden under a glittering facade, of a sick society...
...flight from Europe and safe arrival in the United States, something unexplained happened to him and his art, something that took away from him the precious sting that had nearly made him the Daumier of our time...
...We hoped that from the security of his new homeland Grosz would continue the good fight against the enemies of civilization...
...Daumier of Our Time by Alfred Werner T HE TRAGIC ARTIST in history or imagination is a harassed man of genius, unrecognized by the critics, unable to sell his work, too poor to support his family or to purchase the necessary pigments, canvases, and brushes, living out his days in a hole fit neither for habitation nor for a studio...
...Or so it seemed...
...Fortunately, in 1932 the Art Students League of New York invited him to come and teach...
...But after Grosz' ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...
...The artist could not deceive himself, however optimistic his frequent pronunciamentos might sound...
...He concentrated on teaching, enjoyed the attention he received in America in the form of Guggenheim Fellowships, medals, and purchase prizes, and turned to subjects that had never attracted him before-desolate sand dunes and shapely female nudes (sometimes a combination of the two...
...But an artist's life can be tragic even though he is financially well off...
...Several years later Grosz* portfolio Ecce Homo (which included a plate showing a prostitute wearing a cross) was confiscated and once again a heavy fine was imposed upon the artist who was charged with "corrupting the inborn sense of shame and virtue innate in the German people...
...In his last years he harbored the illusion that all he had to do to regain his former idealism and strength was to go back to his native land...
...References to the grim past, to the still sorrowful present, are extremely rare...
...He was deprived of his German citizenship, but he remained silent...
Vol. 24 • January 1960 • No. 1
