David Nolan New York
527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001
t: +1 212 925 6190
f: +1 212 334 9139
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GOTHAM ART & THEATER
by Elisabeth Kley
The German artist George Grosz so despised the savagery of World War I that he tried to commit suicide in 1917 and was later almost shot for desertion. His ruthless caricatures of the 1920s captured the perversity of Weimar Berlin, filled with profiteers, prostitutes and poverty-stricken cripples and amputees. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Grosz emigrated to America where he lived until 1958, the year before he died.
The United States, in a way, was one long anticlimax for Grosz. He watched, helplessly, the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust from afar. Much of the artwork he'd left in Germany was destroyed in the Nazi incineration of "degenerate art." Many have thought that his work became weaker in the U.S. and the relatively bucolic landscapes and nudes he made in Cape Cod (hoping, perhaps, for sales) didn't help his reputation.
"George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933-1958," Sept. 16-Oct. 31, 2009, at David Nolan Gallery, however, demonstrates conclusively that Grosz continued making unbelievably powerful and bitterly satirical paintings and drawings throughout his entire career. "I start to paint a nude, sun, dunes, Arcadia and grass, a good fine imagination," he said, "but alas, the more I go on with my work, it changes and all of a sudden there is fire and ruins and mud and grim debris all over. . . as if somebody more knowing and utterly destructive is leading me on."
Grosz's works on canvas do feature dribbles and slashes of piled-on paint that can bring the purposeful decadence of late de Chirico to mind. God of War (1944), for example, an almost sickly image of a bearded heavenly titan who glories in human suffering, is rendered in fluffy brushstrokes of pink, blue and white. Cain or Hitler in Hell (1944), in contrast, is a portrayal of an enormous Fuhrer sitting on a rock in a blackened inferno with sweat running down his forehead, in front of a heap of tiny skeletons.
Even after the Nazis were finally defeated, Grosz remained pessimistic. In The Grey Man Dances (1949), an image of absolute frustration, a figure with an open skull and torso cavorts in front of a ragged flag and a pair of red buildings. His ears are covered with blocks of wood, his mouth is sewed shut, and spirals of barbed wire surround him. Grosz's nihilism is even more all-pervasive in The Painter of the Hole II (1950), a portrait of a bug-eyed artist obsessively creating representations of rips. Tubes of paint litter the ground, rats crawl over canvases, and the sky behind him shines through the hole that pierces his elongated forehead.
The latest works in the exhibition, two examples from a group of 40 photomontages, are as purely Dada as anything Grosz made in the Weimar era. This is a Man? (1957) features a pair of huge breasts and a strange twisted face meticulously pasted over a banal photo of a bathing beauty, turning her into a grimacing monster. Grosz died of a heart attack in Germany the next year, after a long night of carousing.
George Grosz
In America, from 1933 until a year before his death, in 1959, Grosz spun his wheels in sands of freedom and security. He remained a great graphic artist and a pretty good painter, but nothing concentrated his genius like the depravity and menace of Weimar Berlin. A smartly curated show of twenty-nine pictures in a salad of styles—ranging from surrealistically eroticized beach scenes, painted at his summer home on Cape Cod, to the suitable sulfurous "Cain or Hitler in Hell" (1944)—contests gamely, but in vain, the stark truth of Grosz's decline. He could cope with anything but personal happiness. Through Oct. 31.
GEORGE GROSZ
'The Years in America: 1933-1958'
David Nolan
527 West 29th Street, Chelsea
Through Oct. 31
George Grosz will always be remembered as a gleefully vitriolic satirist of bourgeois complacency and political corruption during the years of the Weimar Republic. Yet for more than half his artistic life he lived in the United States, returning to Berlin just a few months before he died.
This fascinating, sad show and its large, excellently produced accompanying book reveal much about why his American sojourn has been overlooked: the exhibition presents an artist who, in the absence of immediate targets for his rage and indignation, lost his way.
The most compelling works are surrealistic meditations on war and devastation in Europe. An oil painting titled "Cain or Hitler in Hell" (1944) shows Hitler sitting in a dark, fiery landscape with a pile of little skeletons at his feet. Mopping his sweating brow, he seems oddly sympathetic, as though Grosz were projecting his own sense of loss and grief onto him. "The Grey Man Dances" (1949), in which a crazed, scarecrowlike figure does a jig with a ruined cityscape in the background, suggests infuriated creative impotence.
In the United States, Grosz taught at the Art Students League, produced book and magazine illustrations, and summered on Cape Cod with his wife and children. Drawings of nude women among the dunes are saccharine but touching. On the other hand, Dada-style collages from 1957 representing monstrously distorted people suggest that he never entirely lost his scabrous sense of humor. KEN JOHNSON
Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero
Many people have asked me how the art world is doing in the economic downturn. I am sorry to report that the art world died in early August. This tragic event was not unexpected, nor was it unwelcome. The previous several months had been rough. The end came as a blessing.
After the death of the art world comes its afterlife. The silly season that stretched for nearly a decade will give way to more sober reflection. Galleries will continue to close. But we also know that some galleries will survive, thanks to their intelligence and sensitivity to the emerging mood. Several are off to a good start.
One artist whose antennae were always attuned to changing situations was the German Expressionist George Grosz. The artist is now the subject of a museum-quality exhibition at David Nolan. The business of good gallery-making begins with the education of the eye. With twenty-nine Grosz paintings and drawings and a 280-page catalogue, David Nolan is now running his own class in Grosz anatomy.
In the 1920s Grosz lampooned the excesses of the Weimar Republic, corrupt and blind to Germany's darker forces. He singled out Adolf Hitler for ridicule when the Führer was little more than a failed artist. A one-time member of the Communist Party, Grosz also repudiated his leftist allegiances after a visit to the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin came to appear to him as two sides of the same war machine. Rightly so. Yet perhaps most surprisingly, Grosz developed an unalloyed exuberance for the United States. This romanticism emerged first through his reading of popular American literature and developed in dialectical opposition to his pessimism towards the deteriorating European climate.
When an invitation came in 1932 to teach a summer course at the Art Students League, Grosz booked passage the next month on the ocean liner New York. He arrived to the fanfare of the American press. He wrote back to his wife: "I love you, America. I feel like this is my country, I belong here." He soon decided to emigrate with his family to New York and did so early the next year. Two weeks after his arrival, SA troops stormed his flat and studio in Berlin and declared him an enemy of the regime.
Anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, pro-America—the trifecta of political astuteness, but a victory that has complicated Grosz's legacy. Anti-Hitler, good. Anti-Stalin, tolerable. Pro-America, beyond the pale. As Klaus Mann, an exile in Paris, complained in 1936: "He has changed; a very long, very passionate battle has left him tired. He has become apolitical—or is at least trying to be… . He no longer draws: he paints."
Grosz lived and worked in the United States for twenty-five years. He became one of the earliest high-profile refugees from Hitler. Yet while his audience expected the caustic illustrator to turn his pen against his new homeland, Grosz went about exploring other sides of his artistic vision. The nudes and landscapes that resulted are the revelations of the Nolan show, along with the dense allegorical work he developed in paint.
Grosz could apply his talents for drafting to many styles. The show ranges from black-and-white wartime illustrations to satirical send-ups of Hitler (So Smells Defeat [1937]). He worked his way through the Old Masters, Breugel in particular, by creating pressure-cooked paintings like the infernal Retreat (Rückzug) (1946) with swirling fires, twisted barbed wire, and a shot-up brick wall that has a three-dimensional texture in oil. In Cain or Hitler in Hell (1944), a pile of human skeletons climbs up Hitler's leg.
That Grosz had a flip side to his dark vision makes him a more complex and interesting artist. His "romantic" American landscapes are as true to their own time and place as are his dystopian images of Europe. Grosz lived on Long Island and vacationed on Cape Cod. He adored the beaches and often painted his wife, Eva, in nude and sometimes erotic scenes in the dunes. The rolling sand and wispy beach grass in Grosz's landscapes become fecund allegories for a land of milk and honey. As he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1950, "What do you have against the dune paintings and nature studies, they are part of the whole oeuvre—if I hadn't done them (with passion and love, too), I would not have been able to paint my imaginative pictures, because 'invention' is only derived from nature." He was right. Drawings like Dunes at Wellfleet (c. 1940) and Dunes Cape Cod (1939) are among the best works in the show, and to be blind to them is to be blind to Grosz's entire vision.