Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia

Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia

Author:Camille Paglia [Paglia, Camille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: #philosophy, #pw3
ISBN: 9780375424601
Amazon: 0307278026
Goodreads: 13531080
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2012-10-16T00:00:00+00:00


19

HEART OF STONE

George Grosz, Life Makes You Happy!

George Grosz, Life Makes You Happy! [Freut Euch des Lebens!].

1923. Ink drawing from Abrechnung folgt! (Illustration Credit 19.1)

Click here to view a larger version of this image.

The catastrophe of World War I, then called the Great War, ended Europe’s view of itself as the most enlightened civilization in history. After four years of stalemate and over eight million lives lost, little was achieved beyond the redrawing of a few borderlines. Artists decades earlier had prophetically sensed fractures and tremors in the confident European empires. In the late nineteenth century, Symbolism in both literature and art turned away from the social world toward a hallucinatory mysticism, often marked by decadence. A prototypical Symbolist painting was the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s The Scream, where a withered, asexual elf stands paralyzed on a bridge, buffeted by waves of energy from a lurid red sky.

George Grosz was born in Berlin in 1893 and raised in a Prussian town now part of Poland. He attended art school in Dresden, where training was still very conventional, requiring drawing from plaster casts of classical statues. But he was also exposed to the radical work of a local group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), who were developing a new style: Expressionism, as prefigured by Munch. Its principal characteristic is distortion of the outer world through inner suffering. Expressionism expresses the artist’s emotions but without Romantic lyricism or ecstasy. Its keynotes are anxiety, fear, disgust, and despair, reflecting alienation from a disordered society.

Grosz was always fascinated by popular culture and, even as a student, contributed to satirical magazines. He loved children’s art as well as the sensational pictorial press. He copied toilet graffiti and collected pornographic postcards and other cheap memorabilia usually dismissed as kitsch (trash). His mischievous taste for the macabre resembled that of his British contemporary Alfred Hitchcock. Inspired by horror stories and crime annals, Grosz produced over his lifetime a host of grisly pictures of torture, mutilation, murder, and rape. It was as if he had multiple personalities: “How many people live within us?” he asked in his autobiography.

In 1912, Grosz enrolled at an arts college in Berlin. The following year, he studied briefly in Paris, where he encountered Fauvism and Cubism. When Germany declared war in 1914, he volunteered for service. But his traumatic experiences in the trenches led to a nervous breakdown and hospitalization. Like many others of his generation on both sides of the conflict, he turned against militarism and lost all respect for authority and institutions. Back in Berlin, Grosz joined the Dada movement, which used nonsense to attack the absurdity of the war. Dada derided everything that people held sacred: thus Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa and exhibited a urinal as art. Grosz performed in many Dada stunts, which were an ideal forum for his prankish humor.

After the war, Grosz abandoned Dada and also scrapped his Cubist collages of faceless automatons in barren cityscapes. He needed a new artistic style to respond to Germany’s escalating chaos.



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