Word: grosz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plot is not the point. Horváth, who died in 1938, transports us to the world of George Grosz's biting satirical portraits of the bloated German bourgeoisie. Director Keith Hack paces the play with caustic Brechtian briskness, and the large cast ably meets that demand. Scene follows scene in revue fashion, and each blackout brings on the string quartet. At first the music seems endearing. Later, the juxtaposition becomes ominous as the waltzes seem more and more like a smiling mask shielding a leper's face...
...German Dada, on the Bauhaus and its circle, and on international constructivism. "Paris-Berlin" overlaps the earlier shows in those areas; many of the "classics" of the '20s, like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's light-space modulators and constructivist paintings, or the ferocious social satires of George Grosz and Otto Dix, or the Dada visions of mechanized man by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, are on view again in Paris. But the new show deepens the argument by paying more attention to the social and political aims of the German artists and to the country's expressionist...
...have to finish once and for all with the current of French tradition, which almost totally dominates German painting," Grosz wrote to a friend as the first World War was ending. "We have to finish with these weary painters of sentiment and vagueness, Cezanne, Picasso and the rest." Certainly, for the first 20 years of the century, the current between the avant-garde of the two capitals ran only from Paris to Berlin. As the German art historian Werner Spies remarks in the catalogue to "Paris-Berlin," the visits made by Henri Matisse or Robert Delaunay to Germany were "marked...
...language from its weight of inherited content, in the hope of freeing life itself. Chance, ambiguity, insult, nonsense, anything would serve, if it promised to break the crust. Above all, there was irony: the indifference of Duchamp, -the attacks on the social jugular perpetrated by German Dadaists like George Grosz and John Heartfield, and Picabia's drawings, which make mock of the cult of the machine. When this battery of anarchic techniques moved to Paris in the '20s, colliding with a long but temporarily dormant tradition of romanticism, surrealism was the result...
...gestures of Expressionism are superfluous here; they encumber Grosz's stylistic ironies. The Expressionist style is no longer a progressive impulse, but a hindrance. Expressionism had transformed itself from a "movement" into a "school" whose rules had become obsolete. The selectivity of the Bergen collection makes it easy to carefully observe the development of Expressionism. These drawings are chronicles of individual and collective progress: a take-off, a jump, a landing at a new starting point...