Word: grosz
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...spring of 1932, the Art Students League of Manhattan sent a cable to Berlin Artist George Grosz, asking if he would consider a teaching post. The cable came just in time. In brilliant and merciless drawings, Grosz had been attacking German society since 1912; Hitler was one of his victims as early as 1923. Grosz knew he was in danger: he even had a dream in which a friend pleaded with him, "Why don't you go to America?" Grosz accepted the invitation and in time became a U.S. citizen...
Last week two Manhattan galleries opened a joint retrospective of Grosz's paintings and drawings, most of them from his estate. The Forum Gallery has the work he did in Germany from 1912; E. V. Thaw & Co. the work he did in the U.S. until his death...
Since most of the pictures have never been seen before, the joint exhibition has an automatic excitement. But more significantly, it helps correct the threadbare notion that Grosz stopped being an important artist when he moved to the U.S. His ruthless portrayals of Germans made him the greatest satirist of his time; he drew and painted America with sympathy and even love. When the critics saw the change, they handed down the verdict that Grosz without satire was Grosz without stature. What the critics failed to see-and often still do-is that Grosz was much more than a satirist...
...sure strokes he drew gluttons, drunks, lechers, murderers. He drew officers, paunchy businessmen, high society women with animal appetites and animal indifference to the suf fering of others. It was a world of sadism and decay hiding behind a facade of monocles and iron crosses. From time to time Grosz was arrested and fined, but he kept up the attack until he crossed the Atlantic...
...litany of the age. The pictorial archive from which producers draw-walking corpses at Buchenwald, heiling stormtroopers at Nazi rallies, Hitler jigging while Europe burns-has become predictable if still shocking. But Producer Louis Clyde Stoumen (The Naked Eye), finding new film and skillfully interpolating drawings by Picasso, Grosz, Doré and Wilhelm von Kaulbach, has given the story of those years a new aspect. This Oscar-winning film is not just another post-mortem on Hitler: it is a trenchant commentary on the hows and whys of Naziism...