Hitler's Last Hostages Page 25
By 1944, after the New Yorker articles were published, Grosz expressed a feeling of irrelevancy, writing a friend, “[The] more I go on with my work, it changes and all of a sudden there is fire and ruins and grim debris all over,” noting that “sometimes I feel so utterly out of step of our times.”27
As the war drew to an end in spring 1945, Grosz felt more anxiety, not less, particularly after his son Peter joined the US Armed Forces to fight the Nazis. The proud parent could not forget what his fellow artist Käthe Kollwitz had undergone when her son, also named Peter, had signed up for the Great War and quickly been killed. Peter Grosz survived the war, going on to graduate from Harvard University. Yet the stress of his army enrollment, while it lasted, was another burden on Grosz. The fifty-one-year-old, worried about what the future held for his career and his family, tried to mask his pain with yet more drink.
After Victory in Europe Day on 8 May 1945, as his fellow Americans felt a relief that they could now release the war’s stress and celebrate victory, Grosz grew more obsessed with the war than ever, expressing a feeling that he was “trapped.”
Writing a friend still in Germany, he expressed frustration that his new painting, Cain, arguably one of the best-ever commentaries on Hitler, was being ignored by a nation too eager to move on from World War II. Grosz drew parallels between his war-themed works and those of Francisco Goya, whose output also was underappreciated during the times when the atrocities Goya depicted were actually occurring. Grosz had named the work Cain as a deliberate rejection of the popular idea that Hitler should be equated with Satan. Referring to Hitler as “Satan” or “a monster,” Grosz believed, fetishized the Führer and obscured the reality that he had been a real human whose atrocities had been enabled by fellow humans. Instead, Grosz compared Hitler to Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who, in the Book of Genesis, murders his brother, Abel. Cain had been jealous of Abel’s success and piety, which Grosz saw as an apt metaphor for Hitler’s hatred of Jews. In his own painting, Grosz explained in his letter, Jewish German men, women, and young children—the “victims of fascism” who have “long since been transformed into lousy skeletons”—lie in a pile at Hitler’s feet. In the background are bombed, burning cities. Hitler, by now realizing the Allies will defeat him, is “sitting in the infernal landscape he designed himself. He has sown hatred, and hatred he hath harvested,” wrote Grosz of the artwork. “It is a documentary of our time for future generations—maybe it’s a nightmare but still: it’s as it really was,” he concluded in the letter.28
The artist felt mentally exhausted. Even a $700 prize by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh was not sufficient to cheer Grosz for long; it coincided with his learning in October 1945 that his aunt and mother had been dead for six months, having perished in one of the last Allied bombings of Berlin in spring 1945. Grosz felt unable to mourn their loss openly, though he felt it deeply as he had been close to both women. Americans gave little thought to the thousands of German civilians, mostly women and children, who had died at the end of the war as casualties of a necessary but bloody barrage of bombings designed to expedite the Reich’s capitulation. Grosz’s psyche was torn in two when he thought of his family’s loss: as an anti-Nazi and patriotic American immigrant with a newly minted US passport, he understood the necessity of the bombings. Yet they severed him from his family. As pained as his wife was at seeing her husband’s depression, her family had escaped the war intact. Indeed, thousands of Americans also were mourning the losses and injuries of American troops in Europe. Unlike Grosz, however, they could console themselves that their young men had laid down their lives to ensure that good triumphed over evil, a far more heroic death than being a desultory casualty of war.
Overall, there was a tremendous amount of optimism in the United States after Hitler’s defeat. The war had invigorated the economy, and the relative isolation of America ensured that, despite rationing, new innovations could be developed during wartime that now could be put into production. Grosz succinctly described the postwar atmosphere in America as an obsession with the new phenomenon of “supermarkets” and the luxury of iceboxes, tethered to an increasing anxiety regarding the nation’s position as a growing world power with nuclear capabilities.29 At the same time, corpses lined the streets of Berlin, providing fodder for a burgeoning rat population in a city that had once been a world power but had become a sea of rubble. The dichotomy between where Grosz now lived and the land from which he came was vast.
The last major retrospective for George Grosz, comprising around seventy artworks, took place at the American Artists Galleries in October 1945. His hours of poring over New Yorker cartoons with his son Marty had finally borne fruit. Having finally mastered the ability to pun in English—one of the hardest tasks in learning a foreign language—he titled it A Piece of My World in a World Without Peace. The show also represented progress for the artist on another level: his curator for the show was a woman, Pegeen Sullivan. While Grosz had always been ahead of his time in supporting female expressions of sexuality, including those of his wife, and in promoting the artistic efforts of his female peers such as Käthe Kollwitz and Hannah Höch, prior to his integration into the United States he had been unaccustomed to considering women his full intellectual equals in leading the charge to shape the art world itself.
Grosz’s professional relationship with Sullivan signified the artist’s ability to evolve regarding his views of women in the workplace. The two enjoyed a warm friendship, and Sullivan regularly came over for dinner with Grosz, Eva, and Marty. The teenage Marty would chuckle as his father subjected Sullivan to one of his favorite pranks: the ever-economizing Grosz would buy expensive wine in lovely-looking bottles to share with Eva over intimate nights in. Then, before Sullivan or other friends came to the house in Huntington for a party, he would pour cheap wine he ordered in bulk into the empty bottles that once stored the expensive vintages. Marty held the bottles and a funnel steady as Grosz poured in the cheaper liquid. “George, darling, what is your secret? This wine is delicious!” Marty would hear Sullivan exclaim as she puffed away on a cigar while he and his father suppressed chuckles.30
In her catalogue foreword for the retrospective A Piece of My World in a World Without Peace, Sullivan praised Grosz’s persistence in trying to warn the public about fascist and racist injustices. “In their deeply felt, penetrating and ironic commentaries on life during the past three decades, these pictures form a unique artistic and sociological document,” she wrote, noting that they demonstrated how Grosz had risked his life and livelihood because of attempts at “crying out his warning against the growth of Nazism,” the very movement that had stolen hundreds of his artworks that were still missing in Germany.31 Speaking with the press and visitors, Grosz emphasized the fact that his artworks had a purpose, clear goals that could be deciphered by looking at them, in contrast to the growing abstract art movement. “My pictures can be ‘explained,’” he said, likening them to biblical parables.32
The title work, for which the retrospective was named, had been Grosz’s attempt in 1938 to use art as therapy after he had fled to America and started experiencing nightmares during which, as he described, “the horror came back again, and all the terrible things emerged from the bloody closet room to which I had relegated them. Then those memories streamed through my pictures: men wading through swamps and bloody fog, bones rattling, flesh wasting away, chasms that were flat and long and eternal and never ended; and the men trotting along like ghosts in the crackling, blazing, smoldering glare of the burned cottages and the poised earth, without hope or goal.”33
The retrospective included other key works that Grosz had created in his failed attempt to warn America about the threat the Nazis posed. Among them was The Pit, which Grosz considered the most significant of his American-made paintings because it was, in essence, several paintings rendered on a single five-foot-by-three-foot canvas that succinctly summarized key points of Grosz’s career. In executing The Pit, Grosz use
d the same ferocious red, yellow, and brown tones that Hieronymus Bosch used in his late fifteenth-century apocalyptic paintings. Moving clockwise, The Pit depicts a maimed German soldier from the Great War, followed by a corpulent prostitute copulating with a faceless man, indicative of the vices of post–World War I Germany. They are followed by a gallows from which three corpses dangle, painted in black, white, and red—the official colors of the Weimar Republic. Following several scenes of death, bombing, and murder is the image of a safe, out of which tumble a series of books; by this point in 1946, it had been widely reported that, upon opening Hitler’s safe in Munich, GIs had been disappointed to see that it held only copies of Mein Kampf. Also on the canvas are a begging older woman and a maimed female torso, probably reflecting Grosz’s continued mourning for his mother and aunt. In the center of the painting, surrounded by flames, is an overweight figure chugging liquor while sitting over a quagmire painted in dull browns and maroon.
It is hard not to see The Pit as indicative of Grosz’s own despair and the crippling pull that it had on him; it was quickly acquired by the Wichita Art Museum for its permanent collection. Overall, the exhibition was a tacit acknowledgment by the American art world that Grosz’s warnings about Hitler had been correct.
Still, Americans were not ready to agree with Grosz on what he named America’s newest and largest threat: communism. The artist was not alone in fearing the far-left movement. Eric Blair, writing under the pen name George Orwell, had published Animal Farm the year before and would later publish Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948. Like the writer Orwell, the artist Grosz faced pushback from elite critics skeptical that Russia—an ally in the defeat of Hitler—was now an adversary. “We should get used to ‘war’ the same way we are used to railroads, airplanes, telephones, radios and refrigerators,” Grosz noted.34
Herzfelde, who wrote the introduction for A Piece of My World in a World Without Peace, underplayed Grosz’s objections to communism because he was a communist himself. As with many of his other shows, the journalists covering the exhibition were ill informed about the intricacies of German politics, which were critical to the meaning of Grosz’s work. Writing in the New York Times, prominent art critic Edward Jewell excoriated Grosz’s painting techniques rather than focusing on the validity of the themes present.35
By 1943, Grosz was earning between $2,000 and $5,000 for a large oil painting and between $200 and $500 for a watercolor.36 Combining these earnings with his salary as a teacher, he was able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Still, his annual income fluctuated, fueling his anxiety.37 “I asked myself realistically: ‘How much do you earn a week?’—and that was sufficient cause to consider myself a failure,” Grosz wrote in his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No, published by Dial Press to coincide with the retrospective.38 The book was well received by the New Yorker’s Edmund Wilson, who highlighted its sections on the Weimar Republic. “I have not read anything else which had made me feel to what degree life in Germany became intolerable during the years after the Treaty of Versailles,” lauded Wilson.39 Still, Grosz did not desire to return to his native land, even after the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Berlin offered him a position teaching master classes. “I determined to cast aside my earlier ‘German’ personality like an old, worn-out suit,” Grosz noted in his autobiography. He now felt a persisting “bitterness” toward Germany and craved a calmness. “America seemed very normal to me after all those mad and hectic years in Germany. And I wanted to become just as normal.”40
Despite his depression and cynical disposition, Grosz still felt it vital to foster young talent in the American art world. In addition to mentoring his students, he agreed in 1948 to allow an awkward, lanky twenty-year-old man to photograph him for Look magazine; the publication had named Grosz one of the ten most important American artists alive, following a poll of museum directors and art critics. The artist got on well with the aspiring photographer, who, like Grosz’s younger self, had received mediocre grades in school but yearned to create art that sardonically commented on societal ills. The photograph that Look published showed George Grosz firmly planted on a chair in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk—steps away from a “No Parking” sign. The impish portrait represented a big break for the young Stanley Kubrick, who went on to make Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, films that warned of war’s consequences and, like Grosz’s images, were simultaneously serious and filled with dark humor. Regarding Grosz as an inspiration, Kubrick would treasure a copy of the career-making photograph, pasted in his personal scrapbook, for the rest of his life.41
Grosz was annoyed by how most of the young men and women he taught at the Art Students League were different than Kubrick. Unlike the aspiring filmmaker, Grosz’s students were obsessed with the new enfant terrible of the New York art scene, the thirty-seven-year-old Jackson Pollock, nineteen years Grosz’s junior. The growing popularity of abstract art occurred as a direct result of growing nihilism among artists like Pollock and Mark Rothko, who was forty-six at the time. Like Grosz, Pollock and Rothko drank heavily, but unlike Grosz they possessed violent tempers and severely misogynistic streaks absent in the German American’s psyche. They advocated for Abstract Expressionism, an artistic movement divorced from social commentary that scorned the depiction of humans, figures, and symbols. It seemed to Grosz to be a form of anarchy, a point that Rothko, Pollock, and other Abstract Expressionists did not reject.
By 1950, the Cold War was slowly but surely visible, spurred on by the announcement of the Truman Doctrine three years before, in which the thirty-third President pushed for opposition to Soviet geopolitical expansions. Grosz wanted his students to fight against the Soviet threat rather than veering into abstract nihilism. Yet he was unable to convince them of this. Upset but still possessing his sense of humor, Grosz painted a portrait of himself surrounded by canvases that have been eaten out by vermin. He scowls at the viewer, with an exaggeratedly elongated face, holding a paint brush in his mouth. The canvas depicted in the self-portrait is broken, and a mouse peeks through.
Six years after the war, in spring 1951, George and Eva Grosz traveled back to Germany for the first time in eighteen years. While Eva was thrilled to go, she knew the trip was upsetting for her husband; the couple only had the funds to afford it due to a small inheritance from Grosz’s sister Clara, who recently had died. Clara had given Grosz a set of oil paints when he was ten years old, seeing in him a talent that few others recognized then.42 From May to November 1951, using the funds that Clara had bequeathed them, Eva and George traveled throughout Germany and through the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Switzerland.
Postwar Berlin seemed bizarre to Grosz, though he enjoyed connecting with friends and loved ones. In late June, when the sun stayed high until 10 p.m., he went for a walk with his former publisher Wieland Herzfelde, heartened to see him again after years apart. Yet he felt an omnipresent pain at returning to Germany. A week later, he drank so much with Max Pechstein, the artist who Emil Nolde had falsely claimed to Joseph Goebbels was Jewish, that Grosz somehow broke two teeth. In Berlin, Grosz was angry that so many of his artworks had disappeared. He had no idea that many of them were trapped in the homes of those who had been complicit in supporting Hitler’s regime, including Hildebrand Gurlitt, who by now had been cleared by the Monuments Men and had no intention of returning works by Grosz or anyone else.
The devastation that the war had wrought on Grosz’s finances was clearer than ever during his visit to Berlin: a post-1933 drawing by Grosz fetched around $150, but his pre-1933 works had a market value of around $1,500.43 Though dealers and collectors in Germany could not afford even the lowest of these prices, US buyers were jostling to purchase the early works. Yet Grosz had no idea where the majority of them were. As the trip concluded and winter set in, Grosz noted that he and Eva had felt like “survivors” back in Germany, and he was relieved to return to America.44 Speaking with his son Marty, he expressed his pain at returning to Germany. “He ou
tfoxed the Nazis. He got out. But it was never the same as it could be,” Marty Grosz summarized of the conversations he had with his father about the return trip.45
Grosz had been disturbed by the reality that Berlin now was a split city, a casualty of a war in which Russia and the United States had divided control of the country. The communists would not build the Berlin Wall for another ten years, but the disparities between East Berlin and West Berlin were already apparent. West Berlin, though patently more prosperous, would clearly never be the art world power that it once had been. Grosz realized that the reordering of the art market away from France, Great Britain, and Germany and toward Manhattan was permanent; moving back to Germany would further damage his career. Art world elites now saw Germany as a backwater.
Now fifty-nine years old, Grosz expressed to Marty his angst that he would never be a great artist again. He worried justifiably that his career, derailed by the Nazis, would be defined by the artworks he had created during the Weimar Republic. “He thought many artists were one trick ponies—they do one thing and then never anything else ever again—and he hated one trick ponies,” noted Marty.46
Returning to the United States, Grosz received the commercial success that he had craved for years when Dallas-based department store magnate Leon Harris commissioned him to create a series of four paintings and several drawings portraying Texas. It was a welcome diversion. Grosz loved the Texan style of humor, which resembled his own—upfront, somewhat offensive, but ultimately jolly. He spent hours wandering around Dallas, asking indulgent residents to pose for the types of five-minute sketches he had learned to make in Paris decades before. Texans found him fun and fascinating, and one even gave him a Stetson cowboy hat, which thrilled him.