Alive Inside the Wreck by Joe Woodward

Author:Joe Woodward
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935928-38-6
Publisher: OR Books LLC
Published: 2011-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

ART AS PROSECUTION

New art needs new forms. Art is meant to rustle attention. As early as he was interested in books and reading, West was interested in visual art. From his first days as a cartoonist for The Paradoxian, West made pictures that meant something. His cartoons shouted, “All is not right!” His cartoons had a point to make.

According to Sid, by the time West arrived at Brown he’d dropped any serious notions of a career as a cartoonist. Though Sid flourished as an artist in college and afterwards, he described West’s work as “doodling.” Still, they shared a great appreciation for the medium. Sid explained, “We knew the drawings of George Grosz . . . He was very much interested in Hieronymus Bosch, and the fantastic painters, Goya, and he knew a great deal about medieval art.” West’s passion for art and self-scholarship was always intertwined. He enjoyed studying religious writers and artists too, “He knew a great, great deal about the church writers and the medieval fathers of the church. He’d read an enormous amount about them. That, of course, is reflected in Lonelyhearts. St. John of the Cross, I think, he mentions quite often. Also, there are references, I think, in Balso to Bishop Otto of Clooney.”

Of all the visual artists practicing in the 1920s and early 1930s, the German artist George Grosz appears to have had the greatest impact on him. Sid remembered sharing with West his copy of Grosz’s Ecce Homo (Berlin 1922). Grosz was ten years West’s senior, born in Berlin in 1893. As was true of West, Grosz, “is the perfect example of an artist’s life tied inseparably to the historical, social and political movements of the age and lived in response to them.” The violence and human suffering which arose out of Fascism, Nazism, Communism could not be ignored by writers or artists.

The German art historian Ivo Kranzfelder, having studied and written on Grosz extensively, explained that the artist emerged as World War I came to an end, “In 1917 he co-founded the Berlin wing of the Dada movement. Every member was assigned a function, Grosz’s being designated as ‘propagandada.’ [sic] On his calling card, under his job description, was printed the question, ‘What shall I think tomorrow.’ ” Grosz was acutely interested in depicting the masses as a rudderless mob running amuck in the modern city—a vile and perilous place. Kranzfelder pointed out that Grosz, a student of Le Bon’s 1895 Mass Psychology, believed “observation . . . always confirmed that the human masses are a pitiful mob, an easily influenced herd of cattle that like nothing better than to choose their own butchers.”

Grosz, like West, put his apprenticeship to good use. He passed through the Dresden Academy and completed the graphic arts program in Berlin in 1912 and 1913 at the College of Arts and Crafts. Grosz focused on “fairgrounds, circus and freak-show motifs, of crimes and orgies, and of erotic subjects.” His subject matter matched West’s artistic sensibility. West saw the human condition and modernity in this same way.

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