Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  Yet he produced amazing paintings, drawings, and prints. It is tempting to ascribe their genius to the artist’s unhappiness, a temptation encouraged by the artist’s own words:

  They [the paintings] originated in the years 1911–14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.

  He often compared his lonely state to that of the cocottes whom he painted, women who provoked desire but remained unloved.

  Certainly, the pictures of hard-bitten women trawling in the nighttime city, painted or etched in splintery, distorted shapes, or sketched quickly as “hieroglyphs,” in the artist’s word, appear to convey the shock of a dreamer confronted with the coldness of metropolitan life. They seem a far cry from the idyllic studio settings or nudes-dancing-in-nature pictures of the Dresden period. The colors are more artificial. Even the nudes look different. The Berlin girls, Kirchner remarked, with their “architectonically constructed, severely formed bodies,” were different from the “soft Saxon physique” of his earlier models.

  But they are still beautiful. Unlike pictures of similar scenes by Kirchner’s contemporaries, such as Otto Dix or George Grosz, his work is never marked by physical revulsion. The pastel drawings of his girlfriend, a cabaret dancer named Erna Schilling, posing nude in his Berlin studio, are positively loving. But even the two cocottes in Two Women on the Street (1914), described by Deborah Wye as “ugly and threatening in their anonymity,” have an elegance usually absent in the pictures of disgust by Dix or Grosz. The black hats and black war-widow’s veil, typical of wartime hookers, give their elegance a sinister frisson.4 Kirchner’s Berlin streets may be full of loneliness, bad skin, and cynical intentions, but they are never full of hatred, least of all for women.

  This is true of the street scenes (whether in oil, pastel, or ink), of the nudes, and also of the more openly erotic pictures done in Berlin. Page 42 of the MoMA catalog shows two paintings by Kirchner, one of a fully clothed man in a black suit standing in a room with a nude woman contemplating her own bottom in a mirror, Nude from the Back with Mirror and Man (1912), and the other, called Couple in a Room (1912), of a man fondling a nude woman, who is smoking a cigarette, dressed in a black see-through shift. The colors are muted, the painting is nervy, the atmosphere lewd. The third illustration on that page shows Grosz’s Circe (1927), a watercolor-and-ink picture of a man with the snout of a pig sticking his tongue into the lipsticked mouth of an equally porcine naked hooker in high heels. The Kirchner paintings, in spite of their loucheness, show his love of the female form and his pleasure in sexual display. Grosz, brilliant as always, shows little but loathing.

  Where is the continuity in Kirchner’s work? Wye points out that “there are clear allusions” in Two Women on the Street “to the tribal masks that for Brücke artists inspired radical new forms while also referencing basic instincts.” I think this is right. She goes on to say that these women “seem utterly dehumanized by their profession.” Perhaps so. But Kirchner takes such delight in the basic instincts that he can’t help celebrating them even in heartless Berlin. After all, the jungle of the Potsdamerplatz or the Leipzigerstrasse can be seen as nature too, not as innocent as the rural lakes of Saxony, perhaps, but hardly less lively; if anything, more so. The cocottes may be beasts of prey who make money out of basic instincts, but their erotic performance is as fascinating to the artist, and as vital, as the sexual games in bohemian Dresden.

  Kirchner was not cut out to be a soldier. Nonetheless, in a fit of patriotism he signed up for military service in 1915. Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915), his face a mask of anguish, his right arm a bloody, handless stump, incapable of ever making another picture, shows Kirchner’s terror of going to war. A series of colored woodcuts, made in that same year, on the theme of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow, are brilliant and quite terrifying. Panicked and depressed, Kirchner was in such a poor mental state that he was discharged after two months in the artillery and ordered to get psychiatric treatment.

  After sojourns in various German institutions, Kirchner ended up in that great Alpine sanatorium, the little town of Davos, where he lived out his years. The Nazis had paid him the tribute of classifying much of his work as “degenerate,” including, astonishingly, some of his Swiss work. Perhaps to a Nazi philistine, Kirchner’s style—the bold colors, the distorted figures—might have looked unwholesome, but the pictures of country folk and mountain vistas are a world away from the streets of Berlin. Still, his 1920 painting of Swiss farmers having dinner (Bauernmahlzeit) was displayed in 1937 to the official ridicule of Nazi officials at the Degenerate Art show in Munich, along with Berlin Street Scene and other masterpieces.5

  Even paintings done during the Weimar period in Berlin, which he visited from time to time, had lost much of the old fervor. One in particular, called Street Scene at Night (1926–1927), looks more like a well-designed advertising poster for a visit to the big city.

  To be sure, these late paintings are not as bad as Dix’s picture-postcard landscapes, painted during his time of “inner emigration,” after the Nazis took over and declared him a degenerate artist too. But like Grosz and Dix, Kirchner seems to have needed a constant ingestion of bracing Berlin air to bring out the best in him. The Alpine life calmed him down and weakened his art. His best work was done many years before. To be cast out of the German art world as a degenerate, because of that very work, hurt him deeply. Drugs did the rest. “Now,” he wrote some time before his violent death, “one is just like the cocottes I used to paint. Blurred, then gone the next moment.”

  1 “Kirchner and the Berlin Street,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, August 3–November 10, 2008. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Deborah Wye (Museum of Modern Art, 2008).

  2 Gunnar Schnabel and Monika Tatzkow, The Story of Street Scene: Restitution of Nazi Looted Art, translated by Casey Butterfield (Berlin: Proprietas, 2008).

  3 The large exhibition in 2003 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington was the first Kirchner show in the US in thirty years.

  4 There are different accounts of why these clothes were worn. Wye writes that streetwalkers “took up this disguise either to shield themselves from the police or to elicit sympathy.” Norbert Wolf says the police insisted that the hookers look “ladylike.” On the other hand, the carnage of war produced genuine war widows who had to sell themselves to survive.

  5 Grotesquely, the Swiss painting was described at the Munich exhibition as “German farmers—Yiddish perspective.”

  23

  GEORGE GROSZ’S AMERIKA

  ON MAY 26, 1932, George Grosz boarded the New York at Cuxhaven, bound for the United States. He arrived on June 3. From his hotel (the Great Northern on 57th Street), he wrote letter after letter to his wife, Eva, in Berlin:

  A new, unbelievable world … for me it is and remains … the finest city in the world—Paris: I shit on it. Berlin, well all right (home, language, unlike anywhere else, it can pass). Rome: pigsty. Petersburg: revolting! Moscow: a plebeian village! London: Hats off! Cool respect. New York: the city!!!!!!1

  Four months later he was still ecstatic. A letter to his old friend Otto Schmalhausen: “It is wonderful now in New York. The air is Indian summer-fresh—you feel the presence of the harbor—it is the season for seafood—I eat big deep sea oysters every evening at the Lexington restaurant—Boy what a world!!! … Fresh huge healthy America!”2

  Grosz returned to Germany in October, but came back to New York the following year, this time with his wife and two sons. He stayed until 1959, painting, drawing, and teaching rich women at the Art Students League on 57th Street. “The boys,” Peter and Martin, grew up as Americans. Grosz became a US citizen in 1938. Twenty-seven years: this means that Grosz spent more time in the US as an artist than in his native Berlin. Yet he is famous for his Berlin pictures. His American period is commonly regarded as a failure. One of the many me
rits of the superb Grosz retrospective in Germany3 is that it offers a chance to assess the American work. Grosz himself didn’t consider it a failure at all. Or at least that is what he said. He began full of optimism:

  Everything here, so it seems to me, is—compared to Germany—fresher … I really feel like working. Have painted lots of good stuff. Just as “critical” as I was in Germany—but I think it is (in the best sense) more human, livelier. I often look at Breughel, whose beautiful work you gave me. (Letter to Wieland Herzfelde, June 1933)4

  There might already be a hint of defensiveness here, as though he were afraid of criticism that his Americophilia had taken the sting out of his art. It is still thought that America made Grosz go mushy. His rather charming drawings and watercolors of New York street scenes indeed lack the harshness of his Berlin work. The faces are softer, more sympathetic. In his early German drawings, he deliberately exaggerated the ugliness of German types: the fat necks, the broken veins, the big rumps, the piggy eyes, the thick, pouting lips wrapped around stumpy cigars. He said his vision of Germany had been inspired by graffiti on the walls of public toilets. One of his favorite words (and subjects) was kotzen, to vomit. His art was, as it were, vomited onto the page. (Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, once remarked that Grosz’s drawings of Weimar Berlin were pure reportage.) In New York, his eye was caught by the youthful energy of American crowds. He particularly loved the grace and flashy elegance of rich Negroes in Harlem. The Americans in his drawings of the early 1930s don’t slouch, or march, or leer, as his Berliners do; there is a youthful spring in their step.

  This was the way he saw New York, but it was also the way he wished to see New York. He wanted to be an American illustrator, not a caricaturist. He was famous for his “hate-filled caricatures” and knew that most people “considered the period in which they were drawn my best.” But he did not want to be “a kind of legend, a relic from the Roaring Twenties.” He wanted to please the editors of glossy magazines, the kind of people who said to him: “Not too German, Mr. Grosz! Not too bitter—you know what we mean, don’t you?”5

  He knew, and he found it liberating. He was glad to be in a country where he did not feel any hate. He had grown tired of hating, of politics, of satire. The German poet and translator Hans Sahl, who became friends with Grosz in the US, wrote that Grosz always had been pulled in opposite directions as an artist. There was the political Grosz, the Hogarth of his time, the satirist who wanted to shock people out of their complacency by holding up a ghastly mirror. His other desire was to “paint as beautifully as Rubens or Renoir, sensually, concretely, while exploring forms with an almost academic precision.”6 The US freed Grosz from his Hogarthian demons and allowed him to be the “pure” artist. As Grosz put it in his autobiography:

  How it happened I find hard to explain; let me just say that, as far as I could tell, the natural artist in me came to the surface. In any case I was suddenly sick and tired of satirical cartoons and of pulling faces, and felt that I had done enough clowning to last me a lifetime.7

  The difference in style is indeed visible, even in genres that Grosz had practiced all his life: his erotic pictures, for example. Unfortunately none of Grosz’s German erotic watercolors were on show in Berlin. Some are in the Kronhausen collection in San Francisco. They show hefty women dressed in Scottish kilts or maid’s uniforms being taken from behind by gloating men with large, beet-red penises. These drawings have an obscene beauty: a combination of lust and disgust—the key, in my view, to much of Grosz’s best work. The American erotica are no less graphic: the same outsize genitals, like those in Japanese prints, the same fleshy women on their hands and knees, offering up their large, pink bottoms. But here the women are more Rubenesque, the obscenity is tempered by a more academic concern for fine painting. The subject is still lust, but the effect is somehow less lusty.

  This may simply be a sign of age. It is also true that the relative failure of Grosz’s more academic work—his landscape paintings, say—had little to do with his move to the US. His attempts to express beauty instead of grossness were often boringly conventional during his years in Europe, too. The landscape of Pointe Rouge, Marseille (1927), could have been done by a talented Sunday painter. Grosz had told his dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, that he wanted to paint something that was not “revolting.” He thought this would make his art more commercial (verkäuflicher). He wrote to his friend Marcel Ray that he wanted to be free of “this exaggerated cult of détails.” But it was precisely the revolting détails that made Grosz’s drawings of the 1910s and 1920s powerful.

  It is interesting to compare Grosz’s attempts to be conventional with the work of his contemporary Otto Dix. Dix, too, was at his best when he was most disgusting: the carnage in World War I, the filthy old whores in cheap Berlin brothels. When Dix painted “beautifully”—portraits of his wife and children, for example—he became cloying, kitschy, a Christmas-card artist. Both Dix and Grosz needed the stimulation of their loathing to produce their best work. Loathing was the one thing Grosz did not feel in America; he didn’t want to feel it; he couldn’t afford to feel it. Loathing is what he had wished to leave behind.

  But it didn’t quite work out that way. Despite his eagerness to please the American glossies, Grosz was still Grosz, haunted by dark visions and suffering severe depressions. A drink was never far from his side. Some of his letters read like the ravings of a brilliant drunk. And some of the American paintings are among the darkest, most horrific things he ever made. They are depressing in a way that even his most grotesque Berlin drawings never were. In a painting entitled The Moon has set, and the Pleiades (1944), a tired figure (the artist himself) trudges through the mud during a nocturnal rainstorm. He looks battered, bloody, without hope. A drawing called Shattered Dream (1935) shows a man slumped over a rock, a broken glass in one hand, a bottle, leaking booze, in the other. He looks as if he has just been sick. Immediately behind him is the wreckage of a boat, with the shattered remains of a cross, a paintbrush, and a book. Farther behind him is a city in ruins, and farther still the mirage of Manhattan skyscrapers.

  The feeling of personal despair that went into these paintings was shared by many, perhaps most, émigrés and refugees cast adrift in a strange and indifferent new world. Grosz was onto something real and interesting. And yet the paintings lack the power of his earlier work. They seem rhetorical, unconvincing, without life. The same is true, in my view, of his allegorical paintings of the European catastrophe. Here Grosz modeled himself not on Rubens or Brueghel but on Goya and Bosch. In God of War (1940), Mars is represented as a demonic Nazi, surrounded by the symbolic paraphernalia of contemporary horror: a swastika, the head of a tortured man, a child playing with a machine gun. In The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets (1942), we see Hitler standing in an icy landscape, holding a bloody whip behind his back, like the tail of Beelzebub. The two poets, one playing on a broken lyre, the other scribbling on bits of torn paper adorned with swastikas, are monstrous old graybeards worshiping at the knees of the Führer. Then there is his most famous painting, entitled Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1944), which—like many of his paintings—is composed from elements of older drawings. Hitler is depicted as a haunted figure, mopping the sweat off his brow, sitting on a heap of corpses, as the world is bubbling and burning in the background like a hellish cauldron.

  The subjects of these paintings were no doubt deeply felt, and the imagery is horrific enough. But they refuse to come to life. What is depicted not only lacks realism (as is only natural in allegories) but reality. Grosz wrote in 1946 (to Elisabeth Lindner) that he was not especially interested in representing “reality.” There was no reason for his “nightmares to compete with photography. They are witnesses of my ‘inner’ world—ruins in me, populated by my own lunatics, dwarfs and wizards.”8 Other denizens of Grosz’s inner world are the “stick people,” figures made up of nerves and intestines, who are, in the artist’s words, “without any hope or purpose,” moving a
bout grotesquely in a kind of danse macabre.

  The problem with these allegories is the problem of his “commercial” landscapes: the détails are missing, the small things of daily life, recreated by the artist, that make the work more than just painted rhetoric. The nightmares lack immediacy because they are not observed, and Grosz, I think, needed to observe closely what he painted. He was not comparable to Goya, or even to Max Beckmann, who painted marvelously wherever he was, in Berlin, Amsterdam, or St. Louis. Grosz’s inner life was not enough to feed his art. He needed the buzz and the smell of the streets. And not just any streets but the streets he knew best, of late Wilhelminian, early Republican Berlin, where he could play the dandy, the agent provocateur, the Dadaist clown. It was hard for him to play these roles in New York. As he said in an interview quoted by Christine Fischer-Defoy in the exhibition catalog: “I became kind of conformist in America. I didn’t want to stand out.”

  Here, too, Grosz was probably exaggerating. For he never stopped playacting—his autobiography, written in 1946, is a hilarious but very unreliable document. His roles were getting increasingly stale, however. They belonged to a vanished world. He had frequented the Dada group in Berlin during World War I, and his wonderfully zany Dadaist sense of humor still permeates his letters to fellow exiles, who shared the same memories and understood his jokes. In these letters, written in an inimitable and untranslatable mixture of American English and Berlin slang, one can still sense the afterglow of the Weimar Republic. But reading them, I could not help thinking of the shattered dandyism of Beau Brummell and his friends, who tried to keep up appearances in shabby French seaports after being thrown out of the salons of Regency London. The demented Brummell would hold imaginary soirées in empty hotel rooms.