CULTURAL BOLSHEVIST No. 1

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 243, 18 February 1944, Page 23

CULTURAL BOLSHEVIST No. 1

Profile of George Grose-The Artist Who Enraged Hitler

(From the "New Yorker,’ by courtesy of the American Legation,

Wellington)

EORGE GROSZ is one of the world’s great artists. He is a taut, troubled German of middle age, author- of a series of bitter line-drawings which have been compared to the work of Durer, Bosch, Goya, Hogarth, and Daumier. They depict the rise of Fascism in Germany, and

have evoked a whole literature of panegyric appraising them as the most nearly perfect record of a period ever created. He came to the United States from Germany in 1932, just before Hitler issued a proclamation banning his works and designating him "Cultural Bolshevist No. 1." He spends most of his time alone in his somewhat dark and shadowy studio, a converted bedroom on the second floor of his house. He generally works from nine in the morning until six at night, and often he does not touch the sandwiches and thermos bottle of coffee that Mrs. Grosz places beside his easel. It doesn’t surprise anyone who knows him that his pictures are hung in the leading museums of Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague and Paris, as well as in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum, but it is surprising that so many have not yet heard of him. Grosz’s manner is "stiffly correct," and he usually serves his visitors tea; before he pours for each guest, he makes a curt little bow. He is reluctant to speak to anyone either of his past or of his rather strange convictions. When he does talk about himself, he has the gingerly, tentative manner of a man fingering a bruise, He explains that sometimes, sitting at his window toward evening, a highball in one hand and a pipe in the other, he

can scarcely believe, as he watches the sun slant through his elms, that he is the man a number of Prussian officers threatened to kill during the days of the rise of Fascism in Germany. "Why, when I went to a public gathering, one bodyguard wasn’t enough, and I had to have a group of them!" he says in a tone of disbelief. "In the centre I used to walk." In Germany he was a radical, and for the last 13 years before he came to this country, he fought Hitler’s predecessors and Hitler himself. During that period he was arrested three times for his graphic attacks on Fascists, and those he felt were aiding them. He doesn’t like to talk about his long and losing fight. Even the walls of Grosz’s studio attest to his metamorphosis. He has tacked up specimens of calendar art dealing with such subjects as "Grand-ma’s Birthday," and Saturday arene Post covers by Norman Rockwe Nazis on Record Even Grosz’s studio reveals his warring soul. In the past five years, Grosz has turned out some 50 such drawings and water colours of Nazi brutality. They have made a powerful impression on everyone who has seen them, but he will not exhibit them publicly. "I do them just for myself," he says. "It is a record." For the most part, the drawings attack Hitlerism with a ferocity that has been described as appalling, and with a detail that has made them, in the opinion of one French critic, "the most definitive catalogue of man’s depravity in. all history." Grosz was seldom abstract in his political drawings. He explicitly attacked Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Hitler, Krupp ‘and Thyssen, and as the Fascists increased their campaign of terror, he drew dozens of drawings showing them slaughtering the workers, Day in and day out, for more than 10 years, he drew portraits of hard-faced, creasednecked Prussian officers, and he always depicted them with a dent in the centre of their craniums. He was arrested three times and fined as a menace to the German army, church and State, but he kept up his fight despite the obvious risks, until in 1932, it became apparent that Hitler and his Nazis were going to win. Grosz left Germany and went to the United States. In the following year, Hitler came to power. One of the first things Hitler did was to confiscate all the plates and available copies of the 13 portfolios of Grosz’s drawings.