Theater of Cruelty (43 page)

Yet he produced amazing paintings, drawings, and prints. It is tempting to ascribe their genius to the artist’s unhappiness, a temptation encouraged by the artist’s own words:

He often compared his lonely state to that of the cocottes whom he painted, women who provoked desire but remained unloved.

Certainly, the pictures of hard-bitten women trawling in the nighttime city, painted or etched in splintery, distorted shapes, or sketched quickly as “hieroglyphs,” in the artist’s word, appear to convey the shock of a dreamer confronted with the coldness of metropolitan life. They seem a far cry from the idyllic studio settings or nudes-dancing-in-nature pictures of the Dresden period. The colors are more artificial. Even the nudes look different. The Berlin girls, Kirchner remarked, with their “architectonically constructed, severely formed bodies,” were different from the “soft Saxon physique” of his earlier models.

But they are still beautiful. Unlike pictures of similar scenes by Kirchner’s contemporaries, such as Otto Dix or George Grosz, his work is never marked by physical revulsion. The pastel drawings of his girlfriend, a cabaret dancer named Erna Schilling, posing nude in his Berlin studio, are positively loving. But even the two cocottes in
Two Women on the Street
(1914), described by Deborah Wye as “ugly and threatening in their anonymity,” have an elegance usually absent in the pictures of disgust by Dix or Grosz. The black hats and black war-widow’s veil, typical of wartime hookers, give their elegance a
sinister frisson.
⁴
Kirchner’s Berlin streets may be full of loneliness, bad skin, and cynical intentions, but they are never full of hatred, least of all for women.

This is true of the street scenes (whether in oil, pastel, or ink), of the nudes, and also of the more openly erotic pictures done in Berlin. Page 42 of the MoMA catalog shows two paintings by Kirchner, one of a fully clothed man in a black suit standing in a room with a nude woman contemplating her own bottom in a mirror,
Nude from the Back with Mirror and Man
(1912), and the other, called
Couple in a Room
(1912), of a man fondling a nude woman, who is smoking a cigarette, dressed in a black see-through shift. The colors are muted, the painting is nervy, the atmosphere lewd. The third illustration on that page shows Grosz’s
Circe
(1927), a watercolor-and-ink picture of a man with the snout of a pig sticking his tongue into the lipsticked mouth of an equally porcine naked hooker in high heels. The Kirchner paintings, in spite of their loucheness, show his love of the female form and his pleasure in sexual display. Grosz, brilliant as always, shows little but loathing.

Where is the continuity in Kirchner’s work? Wye points out that “there are clear allusions” in
Two Women on the Street
“to the tribal masks that for
Brücke
artists inspired radical new forms while also referencing basic instincts.” I think this is right. She goes on to say that these women “seem utterly dehumanized by their profession.” Perhaps so. But Kirchner takes such delight in the basic instincts that he can’t help celebrating them even in heartless Berlin. After all, the
jungle of the Potsdamerplatz or the Leipzigerstrasse can be seen as nature too, not as innocent as the rural lakes of Saxony, perhaps, but hardly less lively; if anything, more so. The cocottes may be beasts of prey who make money out of basic instincts, but their erotic performance is as fascinating to the artist, and as vital, as the sexual games in bohemian Dresden.

Kirchner was not cut out to be a soldier. Nonetheless, in a fit of patriotism he signed up for military service in 1915.
Self-Portrait as a Soldier
(1915), his face a mask of anguish, his right arm a bloody, handless stump, incapable of ever making another picture, shows Kirchner’s terror of going to war. A series of colored woodcuts, made in that same year, on the theme of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow, are brilliant and quite terrifying. Panicked and depressed, Kirchner was in such a poor mental state that he was discharged after two months in the artillery and ordered to get psychiatric treatment.

After sojourns in various German institutions, Kirchner ended up in that great Alpine sanatorium, the little town of Davos, where he lived out his years. The Nazis had paid him the tribute of classifying much of his work as “degenerate,” including, astonishingly, some of his Swiss work. Perhaps to a Nazi philistine, Kirchner’s style—the bold colors, the distorted figures—might have looked unwholesome, but the pictures of country folk and mountain vistas are a world away from the streets of Berlin. Still, his 1920 painting of Swiss farmers having dinner (
Bauernmahlzeit
) was displayed in 1937 to the official ridicule of Nazi officials at the Degenerate
Art show in Munich, along with
Berlin Street Scene
and other masterpieces.
⁵

Even paintings done during the Weimar period in Berlin, which he visited from time to time, had lost much of the old fervor. One in particular, called
Street Scene at Night
(1926–1927), looks more like a well-designed advertising poster for a visit to the big city.

To be sure, these late paintings are not as bad as Dix’s picture-postcard landscapes, painted during his time of “inner emigration,” after the Nazis took over and declared him a degenerate artist too. But like Grosz and Dix, Kirchner seems to have needed a constant ingestion of bracing Berlin air to bring out the best in him. The Alpine life calmed him down and weakened his art. His best work was done many years before. To be cast out of the German art world as a degenerate, because of that very work, hurt him deeply. Drugs did the rest. “Now,” he wrote some time before his violent death, “one is just like the cocottes I used to paint. Blurred, then gone the next moment.”

ON MAY 26, 1932
, George Grosz boarded the
New York
at Cuxhaven, bound for the United States. He arrived on June 3. From his hotel (the Great Northern on 57th Street), he wrote letter after letter to his wife, Eva, in Berlin:

Four months later he was still ecstatic. A letter to his old friend Otto Schmalhausen: “It is wonderful now in New York. The air is Indian summer-fresh—you feel the presence of the harbor—it is the season for seafood—I eat big deep sea oysters every evening at the Lexington restaurant—Boy what a world!!! … Fresh huge healthy America!”
²

Grosz returned to Germany in October, but came back to New York the following year, this time with his wife and two sons. He stayed until 1959, painting, drawing, and teaching rich women at the Art Students League on 57th Street. “The boys,” Peter and Martin, grew up as Americans. Grosz became a US citizen in 1938. Twenty-seven years: this means that Grosz spent more time in the US as an artist than in his native Berlin. Yet he is famous for his Berlin pictures. His American period is commonly regarded as a failure. One of the many merits of the superb Grosz retrospective in Germany
³
is that it offers a chance to assess the American work. Grosz himself didn’t consider it a failure at all. Or at least that is what he said. He began full of optimism:

There might already be a hint of defensiveness here, as though he were afraid of criticism that his Americophilia had taken the sting out of his art. It is still thought that America made Grosz go mushy. His rather charming drawings and watercolors of New York street scenes indeed lack the harshness of his Berlin work. The faces are softer, more sympathetic. In his early German drawings, he deliberately
exaggerated the ugliness of German types: the fat necks, the broken veins, the big rumps, the piggy eyes, the thick, pouting lips wrapped around stumpy cigars. He said his vision of Germany had been inspired by graffiti on the walls of public toilets. One of his favorite words (and subjects) was
kotzen
, to vomit. His art was, as it were, vomited onto the page. (Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, once remarked that Grosz’s drawings of Weimar Berlin were pure reportage.) In New York, his eye was caught by the youthful energy of American crowds. He particularly loved the grace and flashy elegance of rich Negroes in Harlem. The Americans in his drawings of the early 1930s don’t slouch, or march, or leer, as his Berliners do; there is a youthful spring in their step.

This was the way he saw New York, but it was also the way he wished to see New York. He wanted to be an American illustrator, not a caricaturist. He was famous for his “hate-filled caricatures” and knew that most people “considered the period in which they were drawn my best.” But he did not want to be “a kind of legend, a relic from the Roaring Twenties.” He wanted to please the editors of glossy magazines, the kind of people who said to him: “Not too German, Mr. Grosz! Not too bitter—you know what we mean, don’t you?”
⁵

He knew, and he found it liberating. He was glad to be in a country where he did not feel any hate. He had grown tired of hating, of politics, of satire. The German poet and translator Hans Sahl, who became friends with Grosz in the US, wrote that Grosz always had been pulled in opposite directions as an artist. There was the political Grosz, the Hogarth of his time, the satirist who wanted to shock people out of their complacency by holding up a ghastly mirror. His other desire was to “paint as beautifully as Rubens or
Renoir, sensually, concretely, while exploring forms with an almost academic precision.”
⁶
The US freed Grosz from his Hogarthian demons and allowed him to be the “pure” artist. As Grosz put it in his autobiography:

The difference in style is indeed visible, even in genres that Grosz had practiced all his life: his erotic pictures, for example. Unfortunately none of Grosz’s German erotic watercolors were on show in Berlin. Some are in the Kronhausen collection in San Francisco. They show hefty women dressed in Scottish kilts or maid’s uniforms being taken from behind by gloating men with large, beet-red penises. These drawings have an obscene beauty: a combination of lust and disgust—the key, in my view, to much of Grosz’s best work. The American erotica are no less graphic: the same outsize genitals, like those in Japanese prints, the same fleshy women on their hands and knees, offering up their large, pink bottoms. But here the women are more Rubenesque, the obscenity is tempered by a more academic concern for fine painting. The subject is still lust, but the effect is somehow less lusty.

This may simply be a sign of age. It is also true that the relative failure of Grosz’s more academic work—his landscape paintings, say—had little to do with his move to the US. His attempts to express
beauty instead of grossness were often boringly conventional during his years in Europe, too. The landscape of Pointe Rouge, Marseille (1927), could have been done by a talented Sunday painter. Grosz had told his dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, that he wanted to paint something that was not “revolting.” He thought this would make his art more commercial (
verkäuflicher
). He wrote to his friend Marcel Ray that he wanted to be free of “this exaggerated cult of
détails
.” But it was precisely the revolting
détails
that made Grosz’s drawings of the 1910s and 1920s powerful.