Mild Monster

A monster named George Grosz arrived last week from Germany to teach at Manhattan's Art Students' League. It was his first U. S. visit, yet wild rumors and alarums had prefixed him a monster.

Artist Grosz's name had sundered the Art Students' League in April (TIME, April 18). President John Sloan had moved to engage Artist Grosz; Director Jonas Lie, a respectable academician, countermoved. Both resigned, Sloan effectually. Artist Lie called Artist Grosz "not a healthy influence for the progress of American youth." In addition it was whispered that Grosz was a Communist.

Artist Grosz's picture of Christ on the Cross wearing a gas mask and Wellington boots (an illustration for the novel, Schweik the Good Soldier) got him and his publisher convicted of blasphemy in 1928. When Grosz explained he had meant only that Christ might have been conscripted in the German draft, they were acquitted.

Burgeois Germany has crumpled before Grosz's terrible pencil, his contemptuous and exact eye. Frequent victims are bull-necked burghers, drunken women with raddled skin and pendulous breasts, fops with snub noses and muskrat mouths, gaunt marble-jawed soldiers, starving children, slatternmouthed old shrews. All are made contemptible, rarely laughable. The pictures look like a child's scrawls, full of scratchy, distracting detail. But critics perceive the basis of sound craftsmanship, understand Grosz's potent European influence. Knowing that satirists usually resemble their favorite object of satire, pupils at the Art Students' League were wondering which of his figures Herr Grosz would resemble. The new teacher who appeared at the Art Students' League last week was a mild, fine-featured little man with precise measuring gestures. His face was ruddy, slightly chubby, kindly, with serious brown eyes, an occasional nervous blush, a baldish brow. His clothes were those of any prosperous American at a baseball game. This, no monster, was George Grosz, 38, normal citizen, husband & father. He resembled none of his subjects, save for teeth slightly muskrat. He was largely unaware of the Sloan-Lie difficulties, had not yet met Mr. Lie. No Communist, he voted for von Hindenburg in the last German election.

Newsmen soon found further points of Grosz normality. Said he: "American beer is quite nice, light, absolutely good. but not to compare with German beer." He has hobbies: carpentry, collecting etchings (Rowlandson and Daumier). He smokes a pipe, rarely a cigar. He is married, has two boys, aged 7 and 3, both quite normal.

Like many a rebel against orthodoxy, George Grosz was a youngest child. His father was a restaurant owner, of the same solid bourgeoisie the son now satirizes. In the War, Grosz fought first in the Kaiser Franz Regiment, then in the 52nd, became a sergeant, was invalided without a wound.

Satirist Grosz had opinions last week about the U. S. face (he had seen only Manhattan faces). He analyzed it as typically pale, thin and long, notably Puritan with heavy lines of violence beside the mouth, somehow suggesting the Amerindian.

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