Page 47 - Studio International - March 1967

Left
Untitled, c. 1950
Collage

Below
The Guilty One Remains Unknown 1919
Pen and India ink, collage
19 3/8 x 13 3/4 in.
Courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago

for a drawn element; other parts of the image are how- The two examples from the newly revealed group of
ever in the realm of the montage— the eye beneath the photo-montage illustrated here represent the two perva-
sun, the bugler at the man's ear, an Adoration Magi at sive themes and the technical approach of much of the
the the lower left. The work may be linked, however, to material. It is no surprise that the feeling of Max Ernst
the mainstream of Grosz's style not only by its insistence should be present, and the mood evoked by the almost
upon the draughtsman's line (which binds the surface senseless insistence upon the skull's repetition is blatant
together even without the pasted additions), but also by Dada. Yet Grosz's sardonic obsession with death
its almost hysterical violence as a contemporary social and decay, more reminiscent of late nineteenth-century
commentary. Romantic fantasy than of twentieth-century Surrealist
Now the intriguing aspect of the new body of material chic, makes the mood of the pieces his own, even when
is its lack of this hysteria and the presence of what can be the format is strongly influenced by the latter school.
called nostaglia. It is well-known that Grosz had always The good life of the fifties left nothing wanting; and if
kept large scrapbooks filled with clippings of all kinds; indeed there was little upon which Grosz could take a
yet the thought to manipulate these photographs in the stance, this is perhaps felt in the haunted emptiness of
manner of his youth apparently had not occurred to the many of these montages—the empty office with one desk,
artist during the previous decades, the thirties and the empty mackinaw in a bleak store window, the Duke
forties, when he had become, if anything, more conser- of Windsor in a ludicrous involvement, Chagall with a
vative, and worked from the landscape and the nude head of sausage. A real ferocity is wanting in these
model. That he had an on-going penchant for the works; in an effort to account for the apparently sudden
grotesque and fantastic is demonstrated by the appear- up-springing of the group, one might adduce a kind of
ance of the Stickman series where the older horror is nostalgia for the days of youth and the vigour of the first
q
generated during the time of the Second World War. days of his creative life.
145