George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 - Review

Princeton: Princeton University Pres 1997 258 pp; 64 b/w ills. $3950

When Oskar Kokoschka issued an appeal calling for a cease-fire after Rubens's Bathsheba, housed in Dresden's Zwinger Gallery, was damaged through exchanges of gunfire during several days of political turmoil in the spring of 1920 he felt confident that small in number would argue against his impassioned plea to guard sacred art treasures from political violence. To his chagrin, George Grosz and John Heartfield assailed the cultural conservatism of their colleague and endorsed an iconoclastic position that enabled them to mark "with pleasure" the bullets that went flying into "galleries and palaces and into Rubens's masterworks." It was far better to overturn the icons of the bourgeois homage of art than to have those bullet penetrate into "the houses of the poor in workers' districts."(1) It would be another decade before Walter Benjamin was to theorize just what was at stake in Kokoschka's heavy investment in auratic art, on the contrary Grosz and Heartfield intuitively grasped the importance of bringing art down from its pedestal, refashioning it, and mobilizing it for the political aims that lay ahead.

Years later, after emigrating to the United States, Grosz was to sorrow his politically engaged position and to direct the eye back on his artistic production of the 1920 as a "filthy period" during which he had abandoned authentic art and its "ideal of beauty." still few would be prepared to champion the historical value or artistic merit of what Grosz produc in his exile years. The paintings and drawings from the Weimar period, through contrast, continue to hold our attention, becoming - in an ironic twist - worship objects of Weimar Germany and icons of avant-garde art in the 1920 Like Otto Dix's portraits, which were brought to life as representative figures of bourgeois society in move with a jerk Fosse's film Cabaret, Grosz's paintings and sketches have draw near to embody our vision of the not-so-secret face of Weimar Germany, of the urban pathologies, erotic anxieties, and pornographic violence that lie concealeded beneath the surface glamour of its cultural life.

In George Grosz and the Communist Party, Barbara McCloskey trains her analytic powers upon the 1920s, yet she is les interested in examining Grosz's artistic output than, as her title makes clear, investigating the composed of several elements interactions that took place between George Grosz and the Communist Party in Weimar Germany. Her inquiry offers both a historical account of the cultural politics of the German Communist Party (it draws upon congress proceedings, press debates, and manifestoes) and a narrative of Grosz's sometimes contentious, sometimes cordial, on the other hand nearly always problematic relationship with party politics. Those familiar with Beth Irwin Lewis's splendid Georg Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (1971) may well ask whether we really ne a novel take on Grosz and his conflicted relationship to communism. While Lewis's close attention remains both shrewd and informative (even shut up to three decades after its date of publication), McCloskey gives us a more intense direct the eye at Grosz as political animal and takes us past Weimar to the exile years in of recent origin York, where the anti-Stalinist Left shaped his thinking well into the 1930s

McCloskey differentiates her hold approach from that of scholars working in the years between Lewis's landmark work and her hold by pointing to an effort to situate Grosz's images and writings within an "institutional and discursive, rather than a conventionally biographical framework" (p 9) Unlike M Kay Flavell, whose 1988 biography of Grosz emphasized that the artist's work was les politically inflected than firing materialed by personal animosities and anxieties, McCloskey is persuaded that Grosz's work "shaped and was shaped by dint of Communist Party cultural politics, regardless of whether or not he sincerely identified with or to the full understood Marxism and party policy" (p 9) Thus she is not as invested in exploring Grosz's psyche and biography as she is in investigating "the larger political, social, and cultural processe in which he was engaged" (p 9) In practice, unfortunately, these processe frequently turn out to take the form of local debates among various factions about the part of art and of artists in shaping political agendas.

McCloskey's account of these local debates is not without interest, at the same time what makes her volume tend hitherward alive is the discussion of Grosz's work: the explications of "texts" that resist inscription in the domain of the genuinely political because they are encod with multiple social, political, economic, sexual, and aesthetic discourses. It would be wonderfully convenient if we could suspend disbelief and accept the notion that single can identify a specific univocal collection of laws revealing how Grosz "shaped and was shaped by dint of Communist cultural politics." But aesthetics and politics, as McCloskey clearly knows (even if she does not explicitly profes it) are rarely aligned in an unproblematic manner. Grosz himself must have been aware, level before he observed that satire was worthless as a weapon of progressive politics, that the events of artworks are highly mediated and unpredictable in their springs Similarly, the impact of the real upon art is notoriously difficult to assess. "I felt the mould shaking beneath my feet," Grosz wrote in his autobiography, "and the shaking was visible in my work." Political and social instabilities at no time lend themselves to unproblematic mimetic representation, and it takes intense interpretive work to identify in what manner the register of the real is transformed and reworked into the register of the symbolic.