Word: grosz
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...work of comic artists brings them down. In Masters of Caricature (Knopf; 240 pages; $25) the productions of savage and subtle comedians from William Hogarth to David Levine pass in review. Ministers of the 19th century wither under Daumier's derision; Thomas Nast sweeps out Tammany Hall; George Grosz annihilates Germany between the wars. But Historian and Art Critic William Feaver's text also makes room for such sly performers as Sir John Tenniel, who created a Wonderland for Alice, and Sir Leslie Ward ("Spy"), whose work has decorated lawyers' offices for almost a century. Those with...
Indeed, the wide-ranging ideas and intentions embodied in Dadaism have been adopted and reworked in different ways by artists in each subsequent decade. The social and political commentary of George Grosz's "End of the Day" (a sketch of factory workers making the dismal trek home) and satiric "Bourgeois Society" resurfaced in the Social Realism of Ben Shahn and other American artists working in the 1930s. Several years ago a scandal ensued when the Guggenheim Museum cancelled a show of photographs of tenement housing on the grounds that the art was too "political...
...Chirico had been set loose in the Ruhr. De Chirico was the main prototype for the fantastic images of this wing of the German avantgarde; there was, for instance, a ready connection to be made between the tailor's dummies he had painted and the cripples depicted by Grosz or Dix, prosthetic men displaying the body re-formed by politics. Grossberg combined suggestions of both in The Diver, 1931, an exceedingly odd image of an empty diving suit, virginally white, standing pathetically within the rushing perspective of a glass-walled Gropius-type factory...
...control - not Leger's confidence in technology, but glimpses of an airless place, always the city, with looming buildings, threatening, gray and crystalline, where the exact divisions between things seem to mirror the divisions and conflicts of class that concerned many of the painters. In particular, they obsessed Grosz. One of his friends called him "a Bolshevik in painting, nauseated by painting." This was not quite true, for although Grosz once declared that compared with the practical tasks of political revolution, art was "an utterly secondary affair," it was the only weapon he had, and he used it diligently...
...that commits itself to the application of virulent stereotypes, as Grosz's did, is not realist at all, and this problem be comes still worse with a painter like Georg Scholz. Scholz's Industrialized Farmers, 1920, is all rant and bile directed against the country folk whose profiteering helped cause the postwar shortages of food in German cities. Sly, pig-stupid and stuffed with moral rectitude, this rural trio looks like a brutal parody of Grant Wood's American Gothic (in fact, it was painted ten years earlier). Scholz took care to spread his political insult...