Word: grosz
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...There, in contrast to the French tradition of measure, delectation and ordered feeling, of art "above" politics, was a cold, laconic, even squalid-looking art that wanted to contribute its voice to the tormented political theater of the Weimar Republic. It was antiexpressionist too; painters like Otto Dix, George Grosz or Christian Schad, having survived the 1914 war, and being immersed in the suffering, inflation and political instability of their defeated country, had no time for the cloudy redemptive ecstasies of German expressionism: its inwardness was, so to speak, an insult to the collective. "My aim is to be understood...
...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...