Word: grosz
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...works of 32-year-old Artist Koerner, who served in the U.S. Army and later with the U.S. Military Government in Berlin, reminded critics of the post-World War I satires of Germany's George Grosz, but, says Koerner, "there's a difference: I do not accuse." One picture in his Berlin show, My Parents, was more than an accusation; it was a memorial portrait of his parents, painted in the Vienna woods, with their backs turned. (They had died in a Nazi concentration camp.) That was a picture which Europeans could best understand...
...brushes on the black market, and almost anyone can sell his stuff (paintings are considered a reasonably good hedge against inflation). But German art is still far below pre-Hitler standards. One good reason why: the painters Hitler had exiled have shown no inclination to hurry back. George Grosz has become a Long Island suburbanite; Lyonel Feininger is busy making watercolors of Manhattan skyscrapers; Max Beckmann broods in Amsterdam...
...gone German. Koerner's painting did have the heaviness, the harsh humor and the all-pervading weltschmerz which characterized German expressionism in the 1920s. Along with My Parents, the show's strongest painting was The Prophet (see cut), which reminded critics of Expressionist Grosz and also of Koerner's favorite Old Master, Peter Bruegel. (Of his bony, monkey-like Prophet, Koerner said that he "might be a demagogue or a statesman, and the man hanging might be a villain or a hero. The people must listen because they can do nothing else...
Settled in suburban Douglaston, L.I., Grosz has made a moderately successful effort to amass the Almighty Dollar. "Money is no fraud," says he; "ideas, on the contrary, can be more or less deceptive." Grosz packed away his worst memories as soon as he got off the boat; took to painting Cape Cod sand dunes and plump, salable nudes like the one who has been haunting him since boyhood. For a whue he even tried illustrating for Esquire. On off days Grosz still occupies himself with elaborate horror pictures, but now there is almost an old-fashioned air about them...
...Grosz's "little yes" to the U.S. remains conditional. "Naturally," he explains, "one needs constant practice. It is not: a simple matter to keep repeating daily: 'Yes, everything is fine...