George Grosz. An Autobiography. Part One

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - 15

George Grosz
An Autobiography
Translated by Nora Hodges, Foreword by Barbara McClosey
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, xvi-312 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part One

[Original Version: February 2018 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) The US edition of 1997

History of a text

George Grosz (1893-1959) left us an autobiography and an impressive collection of letters (the latter published, only partially, in 1979; we will review them separately). The English version of the autobiography was presented for the first time in the United States in 1946. The publishing house, Dial Press, brought it out with the sibylline title A little yes and a big no. The autobiography of George Grosz. It was a text conceived for an American public (Grosz had been living in the US since 1932, and had acquired citizenship since 1938), although it had been written originally in German and translated into English by Lola Sachs Dorin. We know that Grosz had signed the contract with the publisher as early as 1941 [1]; he had been commissioned to write his memoirs also to explain readers in the USA, a country not yet at war, what had happened in Germany in previous decades and had pushed the artist into voluntary exile in the United States.

Grosz's autobiography encompassed the time between his youth and the end of the Second World War. Some sections of the book were inspired by the Memoirs (Lebenserinnerungen) that Grosz had already published in 1931, in three episodes [2], on Kunst und Künstler, the Berliner art magazine printed by the publisher Bruno Cassirer. Those Memories were all dedicated to the period from the studies in Dresden until his transfer to Berlin, between 1908 and 1912. Perhaps he intended to write a German fully-fledged autobiography for Cassirer, already at the beginning of the 1930s. If so, Hitler's takeover of power in 1933 made it impossible: the art of Grosz was included by the Nazi regime in that considered 'degenerate' and Cassirer’s publishing house was closed because of racial laws.

The first German version of the autobiography was released only in 1955, also with the title Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein: Sein Leben von ihm selbst erzählt (A small yes and a big no: his life told by himself), by the Rowohlt publishing house in Hamburg. In the preceding weeks, large sections of the text had been already hosted in the prestigious weekly Die Zeit [3].

Fig. 2) The first edition of the autobiography of George Grosz, printed by the New York publishing house Dial Press in 1946

Compared to the English text of 1946, the German version of 1955 was enriched by a new chapter on the journey made by Grosz in 1922 in the Soviet Union, together with the Danish writer Martin Andersen-Nexo. The two had been invited by the communist regime as Western intellectual 'supporters', to write and draw a book celebrating the new Soviet Russia during the experiment of the New Economic Policy (to this aim, during the journey they were even introduced to Lenin). The main goal of inserting the chapter on Russia in the Autobiography, however, was precisely to clarify the substantial disagreement of the painter with the communist world. Not by chance, that chapter had already been separately published in 1953 (always in German, with the title "Russlandsreise 1922" or Travel to Russia in 1922) in the culture magazine Der Monat - Eine Internationale Zeitschrift für Politik und geistiges Leben (The month - international journal of politics and cultural life [4] – a monthly published in Western Berlin and financed in a clearly anti-Soviet function by the US government in the middle of the cold war).

After moving back to Germany in 1959, Grosz took contact with local publishers to explore their interest in a second volume of memoirs, for which he had already collected the materials. His wish did not materialise, as the painter died of a heart attack only three months after returning to his country of origin.

The fortune of the text

Checking the number of German reprints and translations in other language, it becomes apparent that Grosz's autobiography was one of the most fortunate texts authored by German artists in the twentieth century. After the German edition of 1955, reprints in Germany were brought to the market in 1974, 1986, 1995 by Rowohlt and in 2009 by Schöffling.

Outside Germany, a Dutch version appeared in 1978 (Een klein ja, een groot nee: herinneringen). In 1982 a new pocket edition was published in English, this time by Allison & Babsy, and translated by Arnold Pomerans. Surprisingly, a different American edition was almost simultaneously released in 1983 by Macmillan (with English text by Nora Hodges); this time the title changed and became most prosaically An Autobiography. It was a bound version, enriched by hundreds of drawings and illustrations by the artist; in turn it would be reissued in 1997 by the University of California Press, with a new preface by Barbara McCloskey, the main American scholar of Grosz [5]. This is precisely the version we are reviewing here.

Fig. 3) The first part of the Memoirs (Lebenserinnerungen) by Grosz, published on Kunst und Künstler in 1931

The Italian version Un’autobiografia of 1984 (translated in an excellent way in Italian by the Milanese writer Giovanni Nebuloni) was inspired, in editorial terms, by the American one of the previous year: it had the same simplified title, the same cover and almost the same pagination. The original and complete title of the autobiography reappeared instead, again, in the French (Un petit oui et un grand non. Sa vie racontée par lui-même) and Czech (Malé Ano a velké́ Ne: vlastní životopis) versions in 1999 and in the Spanish one of 2011 (Un sí menor y un no mayor. Memorias de George Grosz).

The image of the artist

Why did the original title of the autobiography read 'A little yes and a big no'? In the book, the painter presented himself to the American public as an artist untied by any convention: individualist, nonconformist, and therefore more inclined to deny that to accept compromises, he was more willing to oppose any prevailing tendency than to participate in general movements, more to swim against stream than to follow fashions.

The image that Grosz offered us of himself was that of a man who profoundly despised masses: in the autobiography, he repeatedly used the term 'mass' in a derogatory sense, to express the disgust towards the soldiers who were accepting and even supporting the militarism of the officers, of the German citizens who did not know how to make use of the freedom given them by the Weimar Republic and embraced Nazism, but also of the US citizens, as they were enslaved to mass consumption and entertainment industry. Grosz did not hesitate to describe himself as a cynic, a misanthrope, a disillusioned man. And, anyway, he was always ready to challenge prevailing social standards and to live in solitude (the big no) in order not to queue up and adhere to collective emotions (the small yes).

Fig. 4) The first German edition, published by Rowohlt in 1955

An autobiography as a piece of literature

An important reason for the success of George Grosz's autobiography was its readability: one can read the 312 pages of the 1997 US edition all in one go. His life was above all treated there as a good story to tell, and transformed into a text to read if one wanted to go through a fascinating, fast and colourful image of Germany in the years 1910-1920 and of the United States in the years 1930-1940. In many sections, the book was more like a novel than the meditative diary of a painter reflecting on his life as an artist (by the way, we said the same for Paul Klee's memoirs).

In the preface, the author explained that he had omitted intentionally many events (the painter introduced the image of a 'fog' enveloping them, speaking of 'twilight', but we know – in reality – that he had kept an accurate archive of all his things) [6].

Some omissions really struck me. First of all, the artist's reticence towards Richard Müller, his teacher at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, under which he studied in 1910. We know (Otto Dix's letters confirmed this) that, with Hitler's coming to power in 1933, Müller turned into a relentless censor, expelling from the Dresden Academy figures like Dix himself and many other teachers belonging to expressionism. Well, Grosz certainly described Müller [7] as an unbearable, authoritarian and intolerant man against any avant-garde (during a lesson, Müller literally declared that Nolde "sticks his finger up his arse and smears it on the paper" [8]), but did not say that (even if only decades after their meeting) he would become one of the main protagonists of the Nazi purge. A purge that, in artistic terms, - one should remember it - also concerned him. In fact, Grosz remembered Müller as a passionate teacher and appreciated his qualities as a painter. These positive judgments could be well understood in the Memories published by Grosz on Kunst und Künstler in 1931 (on that date, Müller had not yet fully revealed to be an unscrupulous political activist at the service of the regime); it is however fairly surprising that in the 1946 version Grosz did not change those pages. Of course, it would have been easy for him to add simply a brief mention of Müller's Nazi past: if he did not, I think there must have been precise reasons: perhaps he had the feeling that, at the Dresden Academy, he had learnt much from Müller on how to make a very precise design, one of the things he appreciated most.

Fig. 5) Issue 56 of the journal Der Monat - Eine Internationale Zeitschrift für Politik und geistiges Leben, with the article "Russlandreise 1922" by George Grosz

It is also certainly not a trivial matter (at least for our artistic imaginary, which today, in substance, unites them as severe censors of German society at the time of the Weimar Republic) that Grosz never spoke of Otto Dix (on the other hand, we also know from Dix’ letters that the antipathy was mutual). Beyond a specific case of personal hostility, it should also be pointed out that the autobiography contained no reference to the artistic stream known as "New Objectivity" (while the information about the participation in the Dada world was very detailed). Today most of the exhibitions on Grosz see him as the leader of the "New Objectivity", in the most creative years of the Weimar Republic. Instead, the term Neue Sachlichkeit (launched in 1925 by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub with a famous exhibition in Mannheim) appeared only once, about Bertold Brecht, and did not identify a pictorial movement, but an 'objective' way of thinking, attentive to science and statistical figures. There were also no references to the other major painters of that current (like for Dix, nothing can be read, for example, about Max Beckmann). If we were to set up an exhibition dedicated to Grosz on the basis of autobiography, many of the combinations that are today usually proposed to the public would reveal to be what they are: artificial reconstructions made in the after-war time.

Unrealized desires and hidden realities

In short, the autobiography proposed a certainly interesting image of Grosz, as a man and an intellectual, as well as of his friendships and his affections. However, it was not a representation of the painter fully in line with what is today the prevailing interpretation of his art. Hence the importance of going back to reading this text, asking at least a few questions. What did Grosz tell us about his art, which we may not have listened to? What do we know, instead, about him and his artistic creation that he voluntarily forgot to write in his memoirs?

One of the messages of the autobiography, which is certainly ignored today, is that - after the transfer to the United States - Grosz repudiated a large part of his previous production, which he considered simply parody and not art in the pure sense of the term. The shift from the desecrating style of the Weimar era to the landscapes and nudes of the American years has often been interpreted as a 'regression'. Critics justified it with the impossibility of practicing a politically aggressive art in a country like the US, dominated by a capitalist market system and consumerist tastes. Grosz, on the other hand, offered an absolutely different interpretation: for him, that passage marked an artistic maturation and the return to his own original vein, lost because of the 1914-1918 war. The reception of his message has actually been almost non-existent to date, as the first exhibition on the 'American' art of Grosz was held at the David Nolan Gallery in New York only in 2009 [9].

By a strange game of fate, Grosz found himself in a situation very similar to that of Dix. The latter claimed, in his letters, the authenticity of his art of the '30s and' 40s, which abandoned the political themes and the social art of Weimar and was instead dominated by landscapes and religious themes; in vain, he tried to propose it as his most authentic creation to the German public (both in Federal and in the Democratic Germany). Both painters did not succeed in promoting their new pictorial language: their (huge) success in Germany and in the world, from the post-war period until today, has remained exclusively linked to the production in the Weimar period, and to a clearly politically-bound artistic creation. How to explain all this? After the war, both in the United States and in Germany, figurative painting lost reputation (it was associated with either Nazi or communist art) and was quickly replaced by abstract art. It is not by chance that Karl Hofer and Max Pechstein were protagonists in the 50s of a failed crusade against abstract art; those who remained anchored in the figurative world were suspected of anti-modernism or (at worst) sympathy for totalitarian aesthetic vies. The adhesion of Grosz and Dix to a classicist and figurative art failed to attract sympathy.

Fig. 6) The Italian version, published by Sugarco in 1984

Within the themes that Grosz tried to belittle in the autobiography, he undoubtedly presented his participation in the grouping of artists favouring the Soviet revolution, immediately after the First World War, with tones of irony and even contempt: "In no time I was head over heels in politics. I made speeches, not really from conviction but rather because there were people standing round all day long arguing and my previous experiences had not taught me any better. My speeches were silly repetitions of liberal banalities, but as my words flowed as smoothly as honey, I ended up by believing the nonsense myself, intoxicated by the noise of my own voice. Once I was even hoisted on a man’s shoulders, amid shouts of: "Long live the proletariat!" As usual, I had been propounding a subject of which I knew nothing: academic freedom. I painted a frighteningly beautiful picture of how henceforth, with the seizure of power by the proletariat, every streetsweeper, every simple worker would be able to attend academies and universities. A privilege, I said with cutting sarcasm, that had heretofore been open only to the sons of the rich. «Long live the proletariat!"» [10]

In the following years (and most noticeably after the trip to Russia in 1922), Grosz moved away from the pro-Soviet positions, but his pictures of the twenties continued to be universally interpreted in the thirties (both by his admirers and his opponents ) as an expression of a harsh criticism of the Weimar Republic, conducted by radical leftist positions. One cannot, therefore, be surprised if, flipping through the catalogues dedicated to the production of those years, Grosz was considered, first by nationalist circles (and then by the National Socialists), as the greatest exponent of an alleged pictorial 'cultural Bolshevism'. Well (as Barbara McCloskey pointed out in her introduction to the American version of 1997), the artist's entire autobiography seems to have been written by Grosz exactly to disprove that image.

From youth to the Great War: realism, caricature, illustration

Let us now try to gather some ideas in the autobiography, which would offer elements of interpretation to understand Grosz's work. From the first pages, he wrote that he always conceived of art as a representation of nature and therefore described himself as a born realist: “I liked the idea of conjuring up something that looked like nature. This pleasure of straight, plain imitation has never left me” [11]. “I went on drawing and copying all sorts of things” [12]. Still a child, in the most remote German province, in Pomerania (today in Poland), he took drawing courses from decorators and designers who were inspired by the Viennese secessionist art of Koloman Moser (1868-1918). His style was, from the beginning, “a linear style” [13].

The passion for observing the real world and the fundamental interest for the line - two of the three elements of Grosz's artistic creation throughout his life - were in fact present since the early years of his youth. The third, instead (i.e. the strong satirical vein) would only manifest over time: “My bent toward humor, let alone satire, had not yet appeared, thought there were occasional indications of that later gift” [14].

At the Dresden Academy – which he entered during the year of study 1908-1909, at only fifteen - Grosz received a traditional education (“a leftover from the old academic tradition of Winckelmann and Cornelius” [15]), based on the copy of ancient Greek models (“As we did nothing but copy those boring plaster busts, the work was getting pretty stale. There seemed no purpose to it; nobody bothered to explain the classical beauty of proportion that they represented, so we never got to understand it. Besides, we were living at a time that glorified ugliness and rejected classical proportion. Copying these examples of great Grecian art was nothing but a stupid chore” [16]).

And here it must be remembered that, since 1905, the first German expressionist group, the Bridge (Die Brücke), was already active in Dresden since a few years. Young students at the Academy - Grosz wrote - were enthusiastic and particularly fascinated by Nolde; they considered him a kind of creative madman, who painted by abandoning the brushes and using rags to lay the colour on the canvas outside of every rule. Grosz was at the Academy in the years when young painters were falling in love with Klee and Kandinsky, the Cubists, the Futurists, Delaunay, Chagall and Ensor [17].

At the end of his studies in Dresden, Grosz moved to Berlin in 1912, confessing that – while he was a good drawer – he had not learned the profession of painter yet (“In reviewing my Dresden years, I can say without resentment that I really did not learn very much” [18]) and he still did not consider himself an artist “in the quiet, orderly sequence of the good old tradition” [19]. He believed to have a simple vocation for illustration (much inspired by his personal preference for Japanese drawing), which revealed more and more a satirical vein (thanks to the love for Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec [20]). The artist was strongly influenced by the designers of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus [21] but also by the drawers of advertising for large commercial chains.

Of course, the painter recognised that, in terms of progress in art, “those were interesting times (…) There was enthusiasm for new ideas, and we beginners were greatly impressed with modern painters from Paris” [22]. But Grosz did not see himself - in those years at least – as an avant-garde painter and, in fact, he did not hesitate to express (implicitly) some support for the theses of the "Protest by German artists" against modern French art, the manifesto written by Carl Vinnen in 1911 against the purchase of French works by German museums: “Berlin was very friendly to foreigners in those days. French art was imported at high prices; well-known critics (whose names have long been forgotten) got on the bandwagon and sang the praises of everything that came out of the Rue de la Boëtie [editorial note: home of the famous gallery of Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959)] in books, newsprint and magazines. The more influential ones who controlled the market and set the prices disdained German art as barbarian and retarded” [23]. That notwithstanding, he added that an admittedly very selective number of German painters managed to raise to fame, and even to money, within the country.

Berlin - characterized in those years by the clash between the traditionalist aesthetics of the Emperor and his circle, on the one hand, and the innovative will of the various souls of the Secession on the other one - was one of the centres of taste development in Germany. “The leaders of modern German painting were living there; Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, the triumvirate of German impressionism” [24]. But for the newcomer Grosz the landmarks of art in Berlin were the painters Erwin Liebe (1844-?) and Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914), all in all very marginal in the scene of the German capital. To the symbolist Liebe the autobiography dedicated a totally disproportionate number of pages, in relation with the vague memory that is still left of him: he was an amateur painter in love with the adventure novelist Karl May, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the musician Richard Wagner. The fifty year old Theodor Kittelsen, Norwegian painter of great culture (one of the many Scandinavians present in Berlin in those years and linked to the world of the Nordic fable), was “a dreamer, inclined towards the absurd” [25] who introduced him to the culture of the Decadent Movement and of the Mephistophelic world, besides being for the young Grosz a tireless companion in drinking evenings. Soon, however, he felt the need to get away from this somewhat hallucinated world: “I, however, my propensity for grotesque satire and fantasy notwithstanding, had a strong sense of reality. (…) Even when I was attracted by the unreal, my innate scepticism would always bring me back to the seemingly safe banality of daily life; I had an almost sportsmanlike desire to look for the ‘truth,’ the actual facts, which would then put me squarely back on the solid ground of ‘reason’ with all my four feet” [26]. One day, at the height of a quarrel, Grosz threw a salad on Kittelsen's head [27]. Nevertheless, the artist recognized a debt with him in the evolution of his style: “Later, probably through Kittelsen’s influence, I widened my monochrome style and painted some areas in flat, tasteful colours” [28].

In Berlin, Grosz made the necessary steps to learn the craft. “I was now starting to paint in oil. I had no teacher, I just bought some books and learned as well as I could. I painted from memory, compositions in the style of my drawings, drafting them in India ink on the canvas and then painting over that in oil. The pictures were conceived in line and were more like drawings in colour” [29]. Then, following other Berlin painters, he decided to go to the Academie Colarossi in Paris. The account was - all in all - very dry: “My friend Fiedler [Translator's note: Herbert Fiedler (1891-1962)] had gone to Paris in 1912 and was writing enthusiastic letters. By the spring of 1913 I had saved a little money, so I went there too. (…) I stayed in Paris for about eight months. I worked very little, and drew mostly models at the Croquis Colarossi, without correction. Beside a few friends, nobody knew me. I would have had to stay longer to get the real feel of the place. But I was not one of those Germans who went to Paris for ten days and were still there ten years later” [30].

From the First World War to 1932

At the outbreak of the war, Grosz volunteered as a simple soldier; in the autobiography, however, he did not mention it. Rapidly, his memoirs let emerge a sense of horror for the military conflict. Another untold element in the diary was that during the years of war the artist changed his name, anglicizing it (from Georg to George) in contempt of Germany. Evidently, such a violent trauma had a profound impact, above all on the subjects of his works; almost all his drawings were now dedicated to the disasters of war: “For me, my art was sort of a safety valve that let the accumulated hot steam escape. Whenever I had time, I would vent my anger in drawings” [31]. And it is precisely in the months of a first leave in Berlin, starting from 1915 (strangely the autobiography spoke erroneously of 1916), that the painter came out of his marginality in the Berlin art community.

Fig. 7) The collection of writings by Theodor Däubler "In struggle for modern art" of 1919

The discoverer of Grosz was one of the main German pacifist intellectuals of those years, Theodor Däubler (1876-1934), poet and writer, but also art critic, resident in Berlin, but exponent of that Hapsburg world of a central Europe which still felt itself, in those days, as the expression of many integrated cultures. Däubler wrote about Grosz in the most intellectually outspoken literary journal of the time (Die Weißen Blätter - White Pages, where Kafka's Metamorphosis was published for the first time in 1915) and introduced him into the educated elite of the capital. Among others, Grosz met industrialist Henry Falk and Count Harry Kessler, who would become his patrons. The painter dedicated pages of gratitude to all of them, to whom he recognizing he owed much of his fortune. From an iconographic point of view, these were also months of maturation: in his oil paintings Grosz never abandoned the line, but put new emphasis on colour. He said: “That breathing spell of 1916-17 was a fertile period in my life, both realistic and romantic. My favorite colours were a deep red and a blackish blue. I felt the floor swaying beneath me, and that showed in my pictures and water colours” [32].

Before the Great War, Grosz did not consider himself part of any artistic avant-garde; but the conflict changed everything and made him join the Dadaist movement, founded at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 and immediately well received in Berlin. “If that expressed anything at all, it was our long fermenting restlessness, discontent and sarcasm. Any national defeat, any change to a new era gives birth to that sort of movement. At a different time in history we might just as well have been flagellants”  [33]. A whole chapter was dedicated to Dada, with memories of many bizarre actions performed together with writers Richard Huelsenbeck (1892- 1974) and Franz Jung (1888-1963) and artists such as Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Johannes Baader (1875 - 1955) and Rudolf Schlichter (1890-1955). More than as an aesthetic movement, Grosz thought of Dada as a collective desecrating attitude. “We Dadaists had ‘meetings’ [we used the English word] in which, for a small admission fee, we did nothing but tell people the truth, i.e. insulted them. We spoke without inhibition using plenty of four-letter words. We would say, ‘You old heap of shit over there –yes, I mean you, you stupid ass,’ or ‘Don’t you laugh, you moron!’ When anybody answered, which of course they did, we would shout the way they did in the army: ‘Shut up, or I’ll give you an ass full’ and so on, and so on” [34].

Grosz's story-telling was disenchanted, even on artists who established themselves well, such as Kurt Schwitters; in his words we can see how, after all, he considered every form of abstract art impossible: “Up to then, there had not been any visual Dada ‘art,’ that is artistic expression and/or philosophy of the garbage can. The leader of this school was a certain Schwitters from Hanover who would scavenge everything he could find in rubbish heaps, dust bins, or heavens knows where: rusty nails, old rags, toothbrushes without bristles, cigar butts, old bicycle spokes, half an umbrella. He collected everything, arranged the stuff on old boards or canvas into smaller, flat rubbish heaps fastened with wire or string; those he exhibited under the name of ‘Art of the Rejected,” and actually sold some. Many critics who wanted to be in the know took this stuff seriously and gave it good reviews. Only ordinary people who know nothing about art reacted normally and called the Dada art junk and garbage – of which indeed it consisted” [35] The painter also recalled the hostility of contemporary artists “because nothing was respected or taken seriously” [36]. Moreover he admitted: “We made fun even of the avantgarde” [37].

The autobiographical pages dedicated to the Weimar Republic offered us an extraordinarily lively fresco of the events and the atmosphere of a space of collective freedom of which the Germans did not manage to make good use (look at the beautiful considerations about Germany on walks with his friend Bertold Brecht [38]). The same pages provided little new information, however, on the evolution of his style in the ten years that separated the beginning of the Dada period from the move to the United States. The autobiography told us more about how his art was received by the public and above all on the relationship between Grosz and many exponents of culture. In particular, it made clear that (also by virtue of his individualism) what counted, for the artist, were mainly bilateral relationships with personalities.

Moreover, it is worth mentioning the brief reference to the trial he had to stand in 1923 for Ecce Homo, a collection of sixteen watercolors of 1922-1923, for which he was accused of obscenity: the painter spoke about it saying that the controversial columnist Maximilian Harden (1861 - 1927) had testified in his favour (Grosz met him by chance at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, while the journalist was still recovering from the aftermath of a terror attack suffered by members of paramilitary bodies against the Weimar Republic). “Now I found him embittered. His eyes wandered over the crowd as though looking for somebody whom he could not find, and if he found him, could not stand. He had used his pen bravely against the camarilla and the politics of Kaiser Wilhelm II; he did not like the new German Republic either. Of the new Russia, he said with a weary gesture of his hand, ‘All wrong, all wrong…’ This was the last time I saw him” [39]. Grosz did not say that, despite Harden's support and Max Liebermann's defensive memoirs, he lost the case and was sentenced to a fine. Obviously, we were in a historical moment in which reactionary circles tried to bring to trial all the artists who were suspected to endanger morality. In 1923, also in Berlin, Otto Dix was taken to trial with similar motivations for his Girl in the mirror  (but, in this case, he won the court case).

Among the friends of the Weimar years, Grosz had a particular link to the painter Jules Pascin (1885-1930), one of the leaders of the so-called School of Paris, inspired by the idea of return to order, and one of the animators of artistic life around the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse. Together with Grosz, Pascin was one of the links between French and German art in the rapprochement phase between the two countries after the Treaty of Locarno of 1925. In relation to the classicism of the Paris School, Grosz had, in reality, great reservations (see what he wrote in the Almanac of Europe by Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim of 1925). In the autobiography, the anticlassicist criticism was instead very veiled. Addressing his friend rhetorically, he wrote: “Often you would suddenly be seized by a mysterious longing; we would hear that you had gone to Italy to rediscover Raphael…” [40]

Fig. 8) The French version published by the publishing house Jacqueline Chambon in 1999

Grosz wrote a few pages full of nostalgia for his friend (Pascin took his life in 1930, after moving to the United States): “The last time I saw you was one of those evenings when we went from one night spot to the next until dawn, collected more and more friends and hangers-on as we went, and you paid for everything. You threw money away like dirty rags, but somehow it followed you and there was always more in your pocket. You simply could not get rid of it. I was sitting next to you; our heads were swimming in music and alcohol; in your low voice you revealed to me, just this once, what it was like inside you. And soon thereafter, you slit your wrists as though you were just cutting off the dirty ends of your cuffs…” [41]

Another figure of reference was Alfred Flechtheim (1878 -1937), one of the major market dealers in those decades. “Alfred Flechtheim was my dealer and also my friend, quite an abnormal relationship. But as a cat and a dog will sometimes get along, nature made an exception in our case too, and we really liked each other. Flechtheim was really a fossil. That is, he was one of the last survivors of a generation of art dealers who regarded art not only as merchandise; they acted more as patrons than as merchants. There were types like that in Europe at the time when princes were no longer buying living art and the rich bourgeoisie, including dealers, took their place. (…) In 1905 on his Paris honeymoon, he once told me, he spent all of his bride’s dowry on modern French art and came home penniless. His in-laws were aghast. What he brought back was a heap of incomprehensible cubist pictures that he claimed to be not only beautiful but even valuable. His keen nose, big as it was keen, had not deceived him. Within a few years, his French moderns were worth two and three times the invested dowry” [42].

Overall, however, ten years of his life were collected in a very few pages only. The autobiography actually failed to tell the story of Grosz in one of the most fascinating periods of German art. It should, in fact, be remembered that in 1931 Grosz published his Memories in the Kunst und Künstler magazine, a sign that the painter was well established and indeed occupied one of the central positions in the German art world. None of this was explained in the 1946 diary. The German years ended with two chapters that had paradigmatic value: a tale [43] on a good man overwhelmed by events (until suicide) due to a mad society and a detailed account of the premonitory dream [44] which pushed the painter to accept, in 1932, the offer by the Art Students League of New York, an independent art school, to hold art classes in the American metropolis. All in all, still a very mild narration of the events in the years leading to the seizure of power by the Nazis.

End of Part One
Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] McCloskey, Barbara – Introduction to the edition of the autobiography of George Grosz published by the University of California Press, page viii.

[2] The Memories (Lebenserinnerungen) were published in Kunst und Künstler in the first three issues of 1931 (and are available on the Internet at the addresses

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk1931/0045?sid=4dce2e7a3cdc3e390d29af56eaba71bf, 

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk1931/0085?sid=4dce2e7a3cdc3e390d29af56eaba71bf and 

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk1931/0135?sid=4dce2e7a3cdc3e390d29af56eaba71bf.

[3] See: http://www.zeit.de/1955/04/ein-kleines-ja-und-ein-grosses-nein.

[4] Grosz, George - Rußlandreise 1922, in “Der Monat”, year 5, number 56, pages 116-223, 1953.

[5] She published the two essays “George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918-1936” in 1997 and “The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order” in 2015.

[6] Grosz, George, An autobiography, Translated by Nora Hodges, Foreword by Barbara McClosey, Berkeley, University of California Press, xvi plus 312 pages. Quotation at page xv.

[7] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), pp. 48-49; 59-63.

[8] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 73.

[9] George Grosz: The years in America 1933 – 1958, edited by Ralph Jentsch, Hatje Cantz, 2009, 280 pages.

[10] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 113.

[11] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 3.

[12] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 31.

[13] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 10.

[14] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 31.

[15] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 51.

[16] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 52.

[17] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), pp. 63-64.

[18] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 80.

[19] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 64.

[20] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 80.

[21] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 80.

[22] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 63.

[23] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 64.

[24] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 88.

[25] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 78.

[26] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 78.

[27] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 91.

[28] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 81.

[29] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 94.

[30] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 95.

[31] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 111.

[32] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 100.

[33] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 133.

[34] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 134.

[35] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 134.

[36] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 138.

[37] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 138.

[38] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 188.

[39] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 156.

[40] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 186.

[41] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), p. 186.

[42] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), pp. 194-195.

[43] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), pp. 201-219.

[44] Grosz, George, An autobiography, (quoted), pp. 221-226.