Nightmarish German

"From my first birthday," the late George Grosz once told a friend, "I was homesick for America." As a boy in Germany, he devoured James Fenimore Cooper, was not yet 20 when he anglicized his first name. But when in 1932 he finally settled down in the U.S. at the age of 39, his violent, anguished art turned tranquil. Grosz was so entranced by his adopted country that everything he drew or painted--landscapes, cityscapes, nudes--was happy and uncritical. He later recovered some of his bite, but his early German work remains the most arresting. Last week Chicago's Richard Feigen Gallery opened a memorial exhibit of early Grosz paintings and drawings, some never shown before.

In his German days Grosz could be outrageous at times, but always he was outraged, and his searing anger burns through to this day. He learned to draw --or so he liked to say--in the officers' club his widowed mother ran for an aristocratic Prussian regiment in Pomerania. There "decrepit old men" would outline lewd pictures with soap on the mirror over the bar, and the boy would copy them in secret. Hardly noticed by them, he closely observed his mother's arrogant, stiff-backed, high-collared customers, whom he delighted in imitating all the rest of his life. "It was an absolutely feudal club," he recalled later, and he hated everything about it.

A Kind of Hell. World War I aggravated his bitterness. He was twice invalided, was finally sent to a hospital for the shell-shocked and insane. When he got out he joined the ranks of the Dadaists, once marched in a parade wearing a death's-head and carrying a poster saying "Dada, Dada, ueber alles." The Dadaists were only a minor influence on his art. He admired the way the Italian futurists portrayed tension and movement. He borrowed a little from the cubists and from Paul Klee, who was so intrigued by the art of children and lunatics.

The most important influence was Germany itself. Grosz saw it as a kind of hell. His Berlin streets were clogged with human monsters--fat, seminaked whores, bulbous businessmen, thin-lipped officers with monocles and Iron Crosses. Rape and murder fascinated him, and the death that hovers over sickbeds and alongside dozing old beggars. Though Grosz was an impeccable draftsman, he used fierce, childlike lines to transform the world into a nightmare of distortion. "I always like to be a little tortured," he said. "You like to laugh, but you also like to be hit. It's the schizophrenia of the German race."

Second Norman Rockwell. He remained schizophrenic to the end. He prospered in the U.S., seemed blind to the Depression, was so contented on canvas that some admirers began to wonder whether he might not have been serious when he said that he would like to be a second Norman Rockwell. Only with the approach of World War II did his old fury return. By 1949 the fire was almost out: Grosz was by then an alcoholic.

"My American dream paid, at least in part," said Grosz, but unlike Kuniyoshi (see above), Grosz never quite made himself into an American. In 1959 he and his wife went back to West Germany--partly, he said, because the government had promised him compensation for the "decadent" works the Nazis had destroyed. One July night that year, in the Berlin he had hated as a younger man, he went out on the town with some friends. Late that night he fainted in his doorway, and while being carried upstairs to bed, he died.

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