| Artist: | Grosz, George |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | At 5:00 in the Morning | |
| Date of Work: | 1921 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post WWI | |
| Movement: | Berlin Dada | |
| Medium: | Ink on Paper | |
| Subject: two contrasting scenes of life at 5:00 am in the morning: the workers march off to war like obedient drones while the factory owners and capitalists who exploit them party on. Grosz shows how corrupt the postwar exploiters are by using a caricature drawing that exaggerates their fat, swollen bodies and lumpy flesh, making them look grotesque and inhuman, though Grosz saw such bestial behavior as all too human. Where is the artist in all this? Where does he fit in? Grosz depicts himself turning his back on them and standing at a remove as he pukes out his disgust. The artist can neither identify with the passive workers nor with the corrupt capitalists, but he does identify with a Dada hatred of a heirarchical class society that he sees as morally bankrupt. Grosz does not paint a pretty picture of humanity here. Style: not academic figure drawing; Grosz uses a deliberately crude, childlike line drawing, which registers his hatred through its scratchy, biting dark humor. His line drawings truly have "edge" and bite. He uses contrast and caricature to point out the absurdity of it all. George Grosz is at his best when he hates; the workers, with whom he does sympathize, are not nearly as animated and interesting as the exploiters, who truly inspired the artist's disgust. Context: Dada anti-art, working deliberately against the aesthetic and the academic in the spirit of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto to create an art of the streets rather than the museums. Anti-decorative and anti-sentimental about humanity; also anti-expressionistic in that it is not about the artist searching his own tortured soul or expressing his internal spiritual angst or precious psyche. Grosz turns his spotlight outward on society more than inward on himself. Dada fought its own war, away from the muddy trenches and back in the cities where it was possible to put blinders on; Dada mounted its attack on the bourgeois morality and complacency that condoned the war from the stages of the cabaret and the streets rather than from the safety of the artist's studio and the art galleries. Dada is an "art" of protest that tried to point out the absurdity of the war, which they saw as hypocritical and morally bankrupt. In Berlin where Grosz worked, Dada became particularly political in its "edge." This image comes after the war, in Germany's troubled aftermath where inflation and corruption reached epidemic proportions, eventually paving the way for a Hitler to rise up and appeal to the beaten Germans' sense of persecution and renewed "war fever." Grosz fought instead for a communist or workers' revolution, but it was brutally squashed down by a militant right wing government. Grosz could not sustain a belief in Communist ideals for long without seeing through its own hypocrisies. Grosz is always best when he hates. A cynical man, his autobiography is titled, "A Little Yes and a Big No." Dada came naturally to Grosz. "We simply scoffed at everything, nothing was sacred to us, we spat on everything and that was Dada . . . our symbol was the void" (George Grosz). Quotations from the Dada Manifesto: "Dada is not a doctrine to be put into practice. Dada--if it's a lie you want--is a prosperous business venture. . . .The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust." | ||
