Big No, Little Yes

George Grosz, who became Europe's bitterest satirical artist, then fled to the New World, found his art in a German army insane asylum in 1917. Last week Grosz, in a readable autobiography (A Little Yes and a Big No; Dial, $7.50), showed that he could write almost as disgustedly as he could draw.

An innkeeper's son, raised in the small town of Stolp, Pomerania, young Grosz spent more time over dime novels than art until he was 14. Then he managed to peek in on a playmate's pretty aunt as she was undressing. Says Grosz: "The image of the naked, Rubenesque woman pursued me and has continued to do so to this day." Grosz went on to art school, where he could peek as much as he liked.

Dung Pit. Grosz spent the first months of World War I as a bored infantryman. Hospitalized for "brain fever" and then discharged, Grosz made an ivory tower of his Berlin studio. "The walls, ceiling and furniture were . . . decorated with cigar bands, bits of broken mirror, and stars made of tinsel," he remembers.

In 1917 Grosz was drafted again. Says he: "I just couldn't take it any more. One night I was found semiconscious, partially buried in a dung pit. ... I was placed in an asylum for war-crazed, shell-shocked and insane soldiers." Grosz emerged from the asylum a pale hurricane of rage. He had reason to hate the men who had been on top in Germany, and "among the masses I found scorn, mockery, fear, oppression, falsehood, betrayal, lies and filth--in abundance." In beaten Germany he found an abundance of subjects, drew thousands of dagger-sharp drawings of pig-faced whores, vulpine businessmen, phthisical Army officers with eroding marble jaws, laborers coughing blood, and clerks sobbing on their knees. His graphic "No" to postwar Germany made Grosz a lion overnight.

For a while Grosz indulged his bitterness in "Dada," a school of artists and poets who decided that nonsense was the only answer to the sort of "sense" they saw around them. Grosz pasted Dada slogans all over Berlin's shop windows. Sample: "Dada kicks you in the behind and you like it."

Dunes & Nudes. From the day he first spotted a swastika, Grosz lashed out at the Nazis. His prophetic cartoons of Hitler's ends & means made him No. 1 on the Nazi list of "degenerate" artists. In 1932, Grosz skipped to the U.S. with his wife and two children.

Settled in suburban Douglaston, L.I., Grosz has made a moderately successful effort to amass the Almighty Dollar. "Money is no fraud," says he; "ideas, on the contrary, can be more or less deceptive." Grosz packed away his worst memories as soon as he got off the boat; took to painting Cape Cod sand dunes and plump, salable nudes like the one who has been haunting him since boyhood. For a whue he even tried illustrating for Esquire. On off days Grosz still occupies himself with elaborate horror pictures, but now there is almost an old-fashioned air about them.

Grosz's "little yes" to the U.S. remains conditional. "Naturally," he explains, "one needs constant practice. It is not: a simple matter to keep repeating daily: 'Yes, everything is fine.'"

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