On the Cover

Cover image: Grosz (1893-1959) Gray Day, 1921. Oil

on canvas, 115.0 � 80.0 cm. �Estate of George Grosz/

Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany.

Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Joerg P.

Anders/Art Resource, NY.

Here we have a properly dressed, cross-eyed, important

person, perhaps a politician a banker or a bureaucrat,

offering his satisfied self to the viewer with manifest

indifference to the characters in the background. Across

the brick wall that divides their worlds, we see a war

veteran who is missing his right arm, further back

a worker who does not even have a face and a fourth

small character whose identity cannot be guessed. In the

background, smoking factories and tall, new buildings.

With the exception of their clothing, this could be

a hyperbolic cartoon of the 2011 panorama of the

USA. But it is not. It is a mordant view of the 1921

Weimar Republic of Germany. Their side of WWI

had ended in a sound defeat. Two million had died

and 4 million dispossessed cripples staggered across the

land.

The new Republic in those days was in the hands of

a bourgeoisie intent on preserving their high life style

after signing the Treaty of Versailles that dismantled the

German economy. Meanwhile Berlin danced in cabarets

and all sorts of orgies were part of daily life. The

threatening leftist movements that arose from this

situation were repressed, inflation was galloping and the

conditions were being created for the appearance of the

National Socialism that would devour them and lead to

World War II.

The artist, George Grosz, was a young communist

who, like others, had became disenchanted after a visit

to the Soviet Union during the times of Lenin and

Trotsky. He was one of the first artists to ridicule Hitler

in his work. Grosz left Germany in 1933, haunted by

the Gestapo. He spent the latter half of his life as

a citizen in the USA where he continued to paint, but

his style and subjects changed from his trademark acid

critiques. As good as his later work may have been,

Grosz has always been known as a German

Expressionist who depicted the decadence of the

Weimar society.

His figures are flat, two-dimensional, and their features

are exaggerated in caricature fashion. In fact, he has been

credited as having contributed to the birth of the

‘‘cartoon’’ genre. The only difference is that in his

paintings, the subjects in the background generate an

impression of depth that cartoons caricatures never

possess.R. Berguer

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