Grosz

What year was it that I was in Berlin that first time? It was before I was traveling with Jen, before my cousin Della had moved there but after the wall had come down — just after. It was well before the eastern part had been razed and replaced with posh, slick newness  I guess that’d make it somewhere around 1990. I would’ve been 32. Jesus, was I ever so young?!

This first visit came just after my Viennese art immersion and sodden stay in Krakow.

While exploring, walking off my astoundingly huge hangover, I happened on a brill retrospective of George Grosz’s paintings. My beloved college painting prof, George Innes, felt my scribbles were moving in a similar direction and wanted me to have a look. Being a callow, unenlightened, doofus-y kid, I'd never heard of the dude. Mr. Innes had studied with Grosz at the Art Students League of New York in the early 1930s and thought the radical German was hot stuff — worth checking out.

Alrighty then. If Innes says go look, I go take a solid gander.

I was intrigued but not altogether pulled into Grosz's hard, harsh, cruel scenes of the people and streets of the Weimar Republic. The lush, sensuous, seemingly less grim Austrians were more up my alley — Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele.

Seeing their work had been the impetus for my 1990 journey.

That Berlin exhibition changed everything. Seeing his paintings and drawings live, up close, in the flesh sparked a realization — a stone knowledge. This, this man's work, was pole-zero.

Grosz's portraits of people and places aren’t conventionally pretty, they don’t soothe and comfort, his drawings aren’t gonna wonderfully complement the taupe highlights of your sofa — that’s not the idea.

My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. . . . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands. . . . I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket. . . I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.”

His paintings and drawings are visual poetry. They tell the hard, luminous, intense stories of life. There's a bitter humor to them as well. Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Bukowski come to mind at the moment. Bleak, bitter beauty.

Why does this memory perc to the surface this morning? In my on-line word game this morning, I had the tiles to spell the artist’s last name and, waddya know, Grosz is a word, not just a name:

grosz
/ɡrɔːʃ/
noun (pl) groszy (ˈɡrɔːʃɪ)
a Polish monetary unit worth one hundredth of a złoty

AND worth 32 points.

It's gonna be an odd day — I can feel it.