Theater of Cruelty (45 page)

Hans Sahl recalls meeting Grosz after the war, at an exhibition of the work of Edvard Munch, in Munich. Grosz, sporting a monocle, was loudly denouncing Munch for the sloppy way he painted clothes.
“A great painter,” he said to Sahl, “must also be a great tailor. He must know how to make shirts, gloves, ties, walking sticks.”
¹³
Grosz knew what he was talking about. He was always fastidious, in his work and about his personal appearance. There is a small drawing, made in 1917, of a man washing the blood off his hands, after having severed the head of his female victim with an ax. There is a curious fussiness about the scene: the woman’s lace-up shoes neatly placed under the bed, the killer’s pocket watch laid on the table, and his jacket and cane, carefully folded and tidied away. This murderer knew how to take care of himself.

Grosz was a dandy. He liked to sit alone at the Café des Westens, powdered and rouged, dressed in a chocolate-brown suit, his cane, topped with an ivory skull, beside him. He affected the detachment of the dandy, the contempt for the bourgeois world, particularly the world of the German bourgeois, the
Spiesser
. Wolfgang Cillessen remarks in his catalog essay that Grosz needed the contrast of German ugliness to set off his own cultivated elegance. Grosz: “To be German is always to be tasteless, stupid, ugly, fat, stiff; to be unable, at the age of forty, to climb a ladder, to be badly dressed. To be German means to be a reactionary of the worst kind; it means that of a hundred people, only one will keep his whole body clean.”
¹⁴

But Grosz was not as detached as all that. Nor was he just a preacher against German depravity, even though another one of his roles was that of the moralist. There is a self-portrait of Grosz posing as a stern German schoolmaster, pointing a warning finger. It is entitled
Self-Portrait as a Warner
(1927). A moralist cannot be completely detached. True dandies don’t warn, they just display their style. But Grosz had, in Cillessen’s happy phrase, a “voluptuous fascination”
with the objects of his scorn. This is what made him such a master of satire, a true disciple of Hogarth, whom Grosz so much admired. Berlin of the 1920s may have been vulgar, grasping, heartless, and full of
Spiesser
, but it was sexy, too. For some, some of the time, life was indeed a cabaret. Even the
Spiesser
, in a crude, swinish way, were sexy. It was that sexiness that Grosz managed to capture in many of his drawings.

Take his pictures of brothels, with their thick, leering customers pawing and tickling half-dressed whores. There is an element of loathing in these drawings and watercolors, maybe even of warning. But also of voluptuous fascination. The way his artist’s eye undresses women in the streets, and sees through the walls of tenement buildings, is meant to expose the hypocrisy of bourgeois city life, the filth behind the respectable façade, but it is also a form of voyeurism, of delight in what his X-ray view reveals. What is true of whores and pimps is true of the beery men at their regular café tables, or the fat, complacent bourgeois families, sitting around pianos or Christmas trees, or even of the grotesque priests and hideous bankers: this was Grosz’s world. He knew it intimately. He was part of it. He was—as he admits in his autobiography—a bit of a
Spiesser
himself.

Grosz was a political artist in the sense that he used his art as a polemical weapon. But he was an agitator more than a propagandist, a moralist more than a political thinker. He joined the German Communist Party, but began to lose faith in progress and the proletarian revolution by the early 1920s—a trip in 1922 to the USSR didn’t help. By the time he left for the US, he had lost it completely. He once said that the larger the crowd he went with, the more of an individualist he became. Brecht recognized this, and never saw Grosz as a reliable Party man. Grosz was not so much in favor of communism, or social democracy, as against the smug, fat face of German authority. This suited his Communist friends, editors, and publishers fine.

Grosz lost faith not only in communism but also in the efficacy of political art. In his autobiography, he wrote that he “had gradually come to see that the propaganda value of art had been highly overrated, that politically committed artists mistook its effects on themselves for the reaction of the ‘beloved proletarian masses.’ ”
¹⁵
He still did marvelous drawings, watercolors, and some paintings after 1923, but nothing, in my view, ever reached the savage beauty of his
Ecce Homo
collection, or the malice of the “lavatory graffiti” drawings of 1916 and 1917. He later considered satire a minor art, but it was there, and not in his attempts at fine art, that he excelled. He lifted the art of shocking the bourgeois to a level of greatness.

At his best, he was so good that his pictures still have the power to shock. Pausing at the Nationalgalerie in front of some drawings made in 1921, I overheard a conversation between three Germans, all aged around sixty: two paunchy men and a woman in a green felt hat. Looking at a picture of obese, cigar-smoking worthies, who were wearing chamber pots on their heads, the woman said, “Revolting!” Her friends agreed. One of the men boomed that he couldn’t understand “this nonsense about
Spiesser
, as though everyone who is normal and decent were a
Spiesser
.” “Quite so,” said the other man just as loudly, “quite so.” Then, suddenly, he was struck by a thought: Was Grosz a Jew? “No, no,” said his friend, “no, no, not a Jew, no, no, not that.”

Grosz began to realize in the US “that caricatures are prized chiefly in periods of cultural decline, that life and death are too fundamental to be subjects of mockery and cheap jibes.”
¹⁶
This is a little too disparaging of the satirist’s art, but Grosz was right about the last part. The Third Reich was not a laughing matter. For satire to
work, or indeed to be possible at all, a certain amount of political and social freedom is needed. And people have to be shockable. The Weimar Republic, with its veneer of bourgeois respectability, its free press, its licentiousness, its greed, and its bumbling politicians, was a perfect target for wicked mockery. As the radical journalist Kurt Tucholsky said, “It is crying out for satire.”

But when the
Spiesser
turn into killers, there is not much a satirist can do, for there is no one left to shock. The reality of Hitler’s Germany was more shocking than any lampoon could be. Grosz did his best in his allegorical paintings, but he failed, because that was not his style, and because the real thing was too overwhelming. His Berlin had already begun to disintegrate some years before he left Germany. By 1930, the Weimar Republic was tottering. A week after Grosz arrived for the second time in New York, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The republic that had filled Grosz with such voluptuous loathing was gone. In 1946, he looked back on the earliest years of his career with nostalgia:

Grosz had never really wished to go back. But his wife wanted to live in Germany again. And so it was that a week after his sad speech and Indian dance at the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1959, they returned to Berlin. Grosz was surprised at how American
the city had become. He also found life slower and more relaxed: “One feels that of every 100 Berliners, 101 are pensioners.” He sent a postcard to Rosina Florio, the director of the Art Students League, begging her to ask him back to New York. She was on holiday when the card arrived. By the time she read it, Grosz was dead. After a night of heavy drinking, he had choked on his own vomit.

THE TYPICAL CRUMB
flavor—wild, sardonic, and exuberant—is exemplified by a little picture story reprinted in the
Handbook
,
¹
entitled “The Adventures of R. Crumb Himself.” It shows the hero going for a walk downtown, coming across the National School of Hard Knocks. He enters the establishment, gets kicked by a mother superior, beaten by a policeman, stomped on by a professor, and just as the nun is about to chop off his penis with an ax, he chops off her head instead. Buying a bomb from a sinister man in a dark ally, Crumb then blows up the School of Hard Knocks and enrolls in a different place called the National School of Hard Knockers, a nubile girl on each arm, his penis hardening, mouth drooling: “So I’m a male chauvinist pig.… Nobody’s perfect … R. Crumb—”

Crumb comics are often very funny, inventive, full of dark fantasies, aggression, and a certain degree of tenderness. Does this make him “the Brueghel of the last half of the twentieth century,” as Robert Hughes, the art critic, claims?
²
Paul Morris, of the Paul Morris
Gallery in New York, also includes Louise Bourgeois in a list of artists whose works, in his view, “have a relationship” with Crumb’s. These comparisons show how much the barriers between so-called fine art and popular art have come down. The best of the comic strips are now shown on museum and gallery walls. As I write this article, the work of nine American cartoonists, including Crumb, is on display at the Pratt Gallery in New York. And Crumb has had shows in several European museums.

Hughes sees affinities between Crumb and Brueghel because Crumb “gives you that tremendous kind of impaction of lusting, suffering, crazed humanity in all sorts of desired gargoyle-like allegorical forms.” Probably so. But then so does Bosch, or Goya, or Picasso, or, for that matter, the Marx Brothers. Although it is good that a critic of fine art recognizes a master of comics, the comparison doesn’t quite explain the eccentric nature of Crumb’s talent.

Crumb himself, though highly aware of artistic traditions, does not make the same claims for himself. In fact, he slyly lampoons them. Perhaps in response to Hughes, he drew a picture of himself in a seventeenth-century painter’s smock, gazing at a distinctly twentieth-century urban American skyline, saying, “Broigul I ain’t … let’s face it.” At the end of
The R. Crumb Handbook
is another self-portrait of the artist, looking more than a little crazed, pen poised over paper, and a glass of something at hand. It is entitled: “R. Crumb’s Universe of Art.” On the right is a list called “Fine Art!” and on the left are “Cartoonists” and “Illustrators.” Among the cartoonists/illustrators are Harvey Kurtzman, Wallace Wood, Thomas Nast, Crumb’s brother Charles, and Crumb’s wife Aline Kaminski Crumb. The fine artists include Bosch, Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Daumier, Hogarth, James Gillray, Van Gogh, Edward Hopper, and George Grosz.

Crumb greatly admires all these people. He has said so on many
occasions. But the selection is interesting. It is not immediately clear where he would place himself. Perhaps in both categories. Or maybe such groupings are arbitrary anyway, but then, why bother making them? Cartoonists like Kurtzman and Nast, not to mention his own brother Charles, are often mentioned by Crumb as major influences on his work. Then so are Hogarth and Gillray. Grosz, too, regarded Hogarth as a model. He once told the diplomat and art collector Harry Kessler that he wanted to be “the German Hogarth.” Kessler wrote that Grosz loathed abstract painting and “the pointlessness of painting as practised so far.” Art for art’s sake didn’t interest him, at least in his Berlin years. He wanted art to be didactic, active, political, like Hogarth or religious art, a function “lost in the nineteenth century.”
³

I’m not sure what Crumb would make of this. But his graffiti-like cartoons of animal greed and cruel lust in twentieth-century America are closer in spirit to Grosz than any other artist I can think of. Like Grosz, Crumb is a born satirist who brandishes his pencil like a stiletto. But he is funnier than the German artist, and wackier. Grosz, quite a pornographer himself, shared Crumb’s love of sturdy female posteriors. And like Crumb, the artist himself usually played a leading part in his pictorial fantasies. But none of Grosz’s pictures shows quite the same high spirits of Crumb, the triumphant nerd conquering those hordes of willing Amazons. Grosz wallowed in obscenity; erotic pleasure came with a certain amount of disgust; one may indeed have fed the other. In comparison, Crumb’s orgies look almost innocent.