"Nothingness of Our Time"

One of George Grosz's first drawings, done when he was twelve, represented a battle in which childlike soldiers enthusiastically killed and maimed one another. Later, as a young man, Grosz did a pen & ink called After It Was Over They Played Cards, showing three murderers sitting over a dismembered corpse. In his obsession with death, Grosz became a rebel against life, against the way men live it and treat each other. Before he escaped from Naziism in 1932, he was one of Germany's best and bitterest satirists.

After he came to the U.S., Grosz softened a bit, did imaginative Manhattan skylines, swirling sea dunes and other nature pieces, some of them almost Oriental in their calmness. Last week George Grosz's life work in all its virulence, violence and artistry was on view in a great, retrospective show at Manhattan's Whitney Museum: 120 oils, watercolors and drawings dating from 1909 to 1953. Though interspersed with a few quiet pieces, it was a compelling collection of horrors. It was also new evidence that Grosz is one of the most forceful artists alive.

Self-Portrait. The most ambitious painting on exhibit, The Pit, is Grosz's favorite, because it embraces in one canvas "the story of my life."

In the lower center is a bloated, hog-faced cherub swilling strong drink (explains Grosz: "I come from a drinking family"). At his left, a fat-buttocked nude is grasped by a hand that protrudes from no body; below lies a soft, naked torso and legs, which Grosz says represents the memory of his mother, killed in a Berlin air raid. In the lower left, a demented soldier hobbles on a crutch, carrying his amputated left leg in the crook of his arm. That figure is a remembrance of the time Grosz spent in a mental military hospital during World War I (nervous breakdown following brain fever); one of his fellow patients was a German soldier who had lost his leg, and carried about a piece of wood in his arm. Over the whole broods the specter of "Mother Europe," gorged with the blood of her dead.

There were many less feverish items than The Pit, including Grosz's old (1927) and well-known portrait of The Poet Afax Hermann-Neisse, so meticulously painted that the skull beneath the hunchbacked mtellectual's tight, bald scalp shows through.

Hollow in Huntington. Among the most revealing was The Painter of the Hole, I, a nihilistic idyl done in 1948. It suggests that Grosz, who at 60 lives a quiet, suburban life in Huntington, N.Y., is still obsessed with despair. A hollow man sits in a Waste Land landscape daubing at a canvas on which is painted nothing but a big hole. Rats, which to Grosz represents man's conscience "always gnawing at him for the deed he did not do," chew at the easel. This painter once believed in something, explains Grosz, but now he paints only a hole, "without meaning, without anything -- nothing but nothingness, the nothingness of our time."

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