POLITICAL ARTIST
Werner, Alfred
POLITICAL ARTIST george grosz, by Beth Irwin Lewis, t University of Wisconsin Press. 328 pp. I Illustrated. $12.50. reviewed by Alfred Werner An enormous amount of research must have gone into...
...reviewed by Alfred Werner An enormous amount of research must have gone into producing this book on George Grosz...
...But perhaps we ought not to take too seriously what Grosz wrote or said about himself...
...Lewis subtitles her book, "Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic...
...Lewis acquaints us with a Germany that had no unity, no shape, no hope...
...What bothers Ms...
...He opted for left-wing politics and devoted his enormous talent as a caricaturist and cartoonist to the service of Tendenzkunst—that is, art as an instrument in political warfare...
...Lewis does not fail to inform us about his American years...
...It is an undeniable fact that he often got himself into serious trouble through the graphic work he produced, and that the first half of his career in Germany was as perilous as the years in America were not...
...Had the Nazis —whom he lampooned right from their first appearance on the scene— caught him, they would have dispatched him to a concentration camp...
...While we do not find any profound examination of the stylistic development of a fine artist, we are presented with an attempt to fathom the soul of this difficult man on the basis of his many verbal and written utterances and his reactions and attitudes to the ominous political phenomena that surrounded him...
...Lewis quotes Grosz's own statement that he had developed his "knife-hard drawing style" to communicate his observations "dictated by absolute hatred of man...
...What results from all this great effort...
...Even the Communists, whose goals he endorsed for a number of years, eventually became angry because he refused to romanticize and sentimentalize the proletariat...
...Gradually Grosz lost interest in the radical left, yet until his flight to America he continued to attack what to him appeared stupid and evil...
...He was dreaded, he was admired —but he was never loved...
...Self-isolated in his villa on Long Island, Grosz began to mass produce non-political drawings and oils which, while technically flawless, have no strength, no real character...
...To be fair, one must note that Ms...
...Beth Irwin Lewis seems to have examined practically everything written about Grosz and about Germany in the period from 1909—when the young artist entered the Academy of Art in Dresden—to that day, early in 1933, when Grosz and his family managed to escape to the United States...
...At sixty-eight he returned to Germany and after a short stay died there...
...not a hundred George Groszes could have saved it...
...During the Weimar Republic years, Grosz had many brushes with the law because of his satires that attacked the leaders of the state, the Wehr-macht, and the Church...
...Lewis, as well as those who knew Grosz personally, is that he, who used pen, pencil, and brush in behalf of the Common Man, seems to have despised man Ms...
...yet the emphasis is, legitimately, on the German part of his career...
...Yet its intellectual and artistic heritage has come down to us...
...He went on working for an additional twenty-six years, and Mrs...
...more than eighty of them are reproduced in her book, which is in many respects an important volume...
...Grosz knew the proletarian milieu of Berlin, with its oppressive poverty in its gloomy streets...
...Werner is the eminent art critic...
...Not a discussion of this unusual man's remarkable Dada-Expressionist art, but of his countless political involvements in the last years of the moribund Hohenzollern Reich, and thereafter in the short-lived Weimar Republic...
...he was saved by a high-ranking aristocratic friend who had him committed to a mental hospital...
...Some of it is incorporated in Grosz' superb drawings...
...The Weimar Republic was doomed from the start...
...Depressed, misanthropic, and alcoholic, he deteriorated as an artist...
...A force during the Weimar Republic, Grosz was feared and hated by many a prominent man who might find himself mercilessly ridiculed in one of the many periodicals to which Grosz contributed his mordant drawings...
...A World War I soldier who loathed militarism, he was once in danger of being shot as a deserter...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
