PRINTS BY GEORGE GROSZ: A SCATHING PORTRAIT OF WEIMAR GERMANY
On view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine
From March 1 to May 11, 2003

By Laurie Meunier Graves

I was rebellious and tried to use my art to convince the world of its ugliness, sickness and hypocrisy...What mattered was to stir up the deep darkness.
–George Grosz

Political cartoonists of all nationalities seem to feel it is their duty to remind us of the world’s “ugliness, sickness and hypocrisy.” Some do it through humor, and when we see their work we laugh and wince at the same time. Other artists are more direct, more serious, and George Grosz belongs in this category. There is nothing funny or humorous about his prints, which are on display at the Portland Museum of Art. They show the greedy, materialistic side of human nature, and with their bold, black lines and swooping curves, they have undeniable power.

According to a handout from the museum, “Grosz was born in Berlin but became an American citizen in 1938…Works in this exhibition date primarily to the years just after World War I, when the [German] Weimar Republic (1919-1933)…was first established.” Many of the prints chronicle the abuses of capitalism. Others show the indifference and the venality of the much-maligned middle class. Apparently, “the Weimer era [was] a period characterized by social, political, and economic turbulence.” We know, of course, what the Weimer era led to, and it certainly wasn’t an improvement. Mr. Grosz was right to be alarmed.

Nine prints in this exhibit come from a 1922 portfolio called The Robbers. The title comes from an eighteenth-century play by Friedrich Schiller, and the play “is a tragic tale of a young man who rebels against the values of his father and an immoral society…Grosz paired lines of the text from the play with the images in this portfolio, thereby giving new meaning to words written a century and a half earlier.”

What is amazing is how contemporary this series feels (and, indeed, the rest of the prints in this exhibit), and, by implication, Schiller’s words. We have a span of nearly three centuries, and while the style of the clothes in the prints might be different and the words of the text a little formal, the meaning is completely clear, as true today as it was for Grosz and Schiller.

In Lions and Tigers Nourish Their Young. Ravens Feast Their Brood on…, a huge businessman is smoking a cigar and sitting at a table. His heavy-lidded eyes are half-closed. As he clutches piles of money to his chest, he does not want to acknowledge the starving child in front of him. In a window that is like a frame, we can see smoking, polluting factories that made him rich but did little for the child.

Then there’s Let Those Swim Who Can and Those Who Are too Clumsy Go Under. A man is sitting at a table. He is slumped over, and with his dark, closed eye and skeletal head, he might be dead or he might be in despair. The poverty of his shabby room is all too apparent. This print brings to mind the worst of individualism with its lack of compassion and cooperation.

From The Robbers series we move on to Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) and what we behold is not heartwarming. There are prints of prostitutes, and with their big, grotesque buttocks, they are not in the least erotic. There is Beauty, I wish to Praise Thee, and it’s one of the two prints that are in color. Again, there are the polluting factories framed by a window. Blood red is the predominant color, and the rest are muted. This print has a cubist look, and in it are men and women in a café. The focus is on one woman, who with her clenched teeth, dark-rimmed eyes, pale, naked body and red breast, is anything but beautiful. The leering, egg-headed men who are sitting near her are hardly beautiful, either.

The Man of the House is a linear, black and white print. It’s a portrait of a man with a huge, fat body, a baldhead, and a long snout of a nose. I’m sure I don’t have to mention which animal he resembles.

After seeing these prints, I thought again about what George Grosz wrote. Does the world really have to be convinced of its ugliness, sickness, and hypocrisy? There’s a part of me that says we don’t, that we already have ample evidence of these things. Yet much of the time, we behave as though ugliness, sickness, and hypocrisy don’t exist or, worse yet, don’t matter. Maybe, in the end, we really do need artists such as George Grosz to remind us that they do.

 

5 1/2" x 5" 2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just $10.00 each
More Info

More Info

© Wolf Moon Press 2002-2008 all rights reserved.

Submission Guidelines