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George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 - Review
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1998 by Maria Tatar
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 258 pp.; 64 b/w ills. $39.50
When Oskar Kokoschka issued an appeal calling for a cease-fire after Rubens's Bathsheba, housed in Dresden's Zwinger Gallery, was damaged by exchanges of gunfire during several days of political turmoil in the spring of 1920, he felt confident that few would argue against his impassioned plea to protect 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 observe "with pleasure" the bullets that went flying into "galleries and palaces and into Rubens's masterworks." It was far better to destroy the icons of the bourgeois cult of art than to have those bullets 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, but Grosz and Heartfield intuitively grasped the importance of bringing art down from its pedestal, refashioning it, and mobilizing it for the political struggles that lay ahead.
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Years later, after emigrating to the United States, Grosz was to regret his politically engaged position and to look back on his artistic production of the 1920s as a "filthy period" during which he had abandoned authentic art and its "ideal of beauty." Yet few would be prepared to champion the historical value or artistic merit of what Grosz produced in his exile years. The paintings and drawings from the Weimar period, by contrast, continue to hold our attention, becoming - in an ironic twist - cult objects of Weimar Germany and icons of avant-garde art in the 1920s. Like Otto Dix's portraits, which were brought to life as representative figures of bourgeois society in Bob Fosse's film Cabaret, Grosz's paintings and sketches have come to embody our vision of the not-so-secret face of Weimar Germany, of the urban pathologies, erotic anxieties, and pornographic violence that lurked beneath the surface glamour of its cultural life.
In George Grosz and the Communist Party, Barbara McCloskey trains her analytic powers on the 1920s, yet she is less interested in examining Grosz's artistic output than, as her title makes clear, investigating the complex interactions that took place between George Grosz and the Communist Party in Weimar Germany. Her study offers both a historical account of the cultural politics of the German Communist Party (it draws on congress proceedings, press debates, and manifestoes) and a narrative of Grosz's sometimes contentious, sometimes cordial, but 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 need a new take on Grosz and his conflicted relationship to communism. While Lewis's study remains both shrewd and informative (even close to three decades after its date of publication), McCloskey gives us a more intense look at Grosz as political animal and takes us past Weimar to the exile years in New York, where the anti-Stalinist Left shaped his thinking well into the 1930s.
McCloskey differentiates her own approach from that of scholars working in the years between Lewis's landmark work and her own 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 less politically inflected than fueled by personal animosities and anxieties, McCloskey is persuaded that Grosz's work "shaped and was shaped by Communist Party cultural politics, regardless of whether or not he sincerely identified with or fully 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 processes in which he was engaged" (p. 9). In practice, unfortunately, these processes often turn out to take the form of local debates among various factions about the role of art and of artists in shaping political agendas.
McCloskey's account of these local debates is not without interest, yet what makes her volume come alive is the discussion of Grosz's work: the explications of "texts" that resist inscription in the domain of the purely political because they are encoded with multiple social, political, economic, sexual, and aesthetic discourses. It would be wonderfully convenient if we could suspend disbelief and accept the notion that one can identify a specific univocal code revealing how Grosz "shaped and was shaped by Communist cultural politics." But aesthetics and politics, as McCloskey clearly knows (even if she does not explicitly profess it) are rarely aligned in an unproblematic manner. Grosz himself must have been aware, even before he observed that satire was worthless as a weapon of progressive politics, that the effects of artworks are highly mediated and unpredictable in their results. Similarly, the impact of the real on art is notoriously difficult to assess. "I felt the ground shaking beneath my feet," Grosz wrote in his autobiography, "and the shaking was visible in my work." Political and social instabilities never lend themselves to unproblematic mimetic representation, and it takes intense interpretive work to identify how the register of the real is transformed and reworked into the register of the symbolic.
