Robin Dude
America Today
The Image
• Painter George Grosz's (née Georg Ehrenfried Groß), The Menace, 1934, inscribed: "To my friend Eric Cohn" - watercolor, brush & India ink on paper.
The photo is of a photograph of the painting in a book given to me by my great, dear & most affectionate friend, Mr. Gravyboat, a gentleman residing with his wife & dozens of cameras somewhere in the British Isles: George Grosz, a Ralph Jentsch book (he is managing director of the Grosz estate), texts by Enrico Crispolti & Philippe Dagen, publisher Skira Editore S.p.A., 2008, Italy (ISBN 978-88-6130-294-50).
George Grosz was an altogether uncommon man, & one deserving of being honored not just for his art, but for extraordinary humanity, wisdom & heroism. If alive today & in America he would have been jailed numerous times since 1980 for refusing to be silent about the nation's ever faster growing status as a vulgar, vicious corporatist police state, & he might well be seeking refuge & freedom of expression in today's Social Democratic Germany (for those very reasons Grosz left his native Germany & came to America just before Hitler took control of it, & by 1932 was teaching art in New York).
Grosz said of his work, "My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society....
"My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. . . . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands. . . . I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket. . . I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.”
Wikipedia biography: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grosz
America Today
The Image
• Painter George Grosz's (née Georg Ehrenfried Groß), The Menace, 1934, inscribed: "To my friend Eric Cohn" - watercolor, brush & India ink on paper.
The photo is of a photograph of the painting in a book given to me by my great, dear & most affectionate friend, Mr. Gravyboat, a gentleman residing with his wife & dozens of cameras somewhere in the British Isles: George Grosz, a Ralph Jentsch book (he is managing director of the Grosz estate), texts by Enrico Crispolti & Philippe Dagen, publisher Skira Editore S.p.A., 2008, Italy (ISBN 978-88-6130-294-50).
George Grosz was an altogether uncommon man, & one deserving of being honored not just for his art, but for extraordinary humanity, wisdom & heroism. If alive today & in America he would have been jailed numerous times since 1980 for refusing to be silent about the nation's ever faster growing status as a vulgar, vicious corporatist police state, & he might well be seeking refuge & freedom of expression in today's Social Democratic Germany (for those very reasons Grosz left his native Germany & came to America just before Hitler took control of it, & by 1932 was teaching art in New York).
Grosz said of his work, "My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society....
"My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. . . . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands. . . . I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket. . . I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.”
Wikipedia biography: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grosz