George Grosz
Artist: George Grosz
Title: I Am Glad I Came Back
Year Produced: 1943
Medium: Oil on masonite
Dimensions: 28" x 20”
Gift of Oliver B. James
About the Artist
“I start to paint a nude (construction, mother and generations to come, sun, dunes, Arcadia, and grass, maybe a nowhere, a good fine imagination)...but alas, [the] more I go on with my work, it changes and all of a sudden there is fire and ruins and mud and grim debris all over...as if somebody more knowing and utterly destructive is leading me on.” George Grosz, May 1944 (2)
“...[I]n America Grosz found himself in surroundings where the main esthetic battles had to do with the development of a new formal language in painting, and his own inclinations pulled him in another direction...With a determination that finally damaged his own art, Grosz largely abandoned questions of form for a flight into personal concerns.” Ulf Erdmann Ziegler (3)
The ASU Art Museum’s collection includes two works by George Grosz,
The Hero,
a drawing done in the early part of his career, and the later painting, I
am Glad I Came Back. Painted by George Grosz in 1943, is one of several allegorical
paintings done by the artist during the Second World War. A vitriolic critic
of the Nazis, Grosz was one of the foremost artists in the Weimar Republic,
lampooning and ridiculing the government, right wing militarism and bourgeois
foibles and vices through the use of highly inflammatory line drawings. He
was a champion of the left wing struggle and spent six months in Soviet Russia,
meeting Soviet notables and observing the Proletariat Dictatorship firsthand.
Disillusioned by what he had seen, he became gradually estranged from his
left wing compatriots, devoting more of his energies criticizing totalitarianism
in all its fronts.
Fleeing from the Nazis in 1933, he relocated in New York, one of many
German exiles to do so. Here he established himself as an artist and began
to reassess his work. In doing this, he embarked on a new body of work that
was and to some extent is still seen as less vital than his earlier work.
The society that had prompted his earlier work, Weimar Germany and the Nazi
Party, had confiscated and destroyed his works and revoked his citizenship;
in his new land, it was inferred, Grosz was lost and his art with him.
“I am glad I came back” is an allegory about death triumphant over life,
something Grosz had predicted in his lampoons of the Nazis while in Germany
and was now observing second hand through reports of the war. His former partisanship
had been transformed into a more generalized humanism. In this painting death
returns triumphant; there is the unpainted hope for a better, more humane
world that, considering Grosz’s ideas, is unattainable. Eschewing his earlier
avant-garde and more formal approach to art, Grosz had become more interested
in the act of painting. In this work, he not so much illustrates the picture
as expresses it; instead of rigid black inked lines and specific stereotypes,
he uses the paint and a more universal symbol, a rotting skeleton peering
through dank drapes, to convey his message of “fire, sword, poison and bombs.”(4)
(1) Lewis, Beth Irwin, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic
(Princeton University Press, Princeton, rev. ed. 1991), p. 237
(2) Flavell, Mary Kay, George Grosz: A Biography, (Yale University Press,
New Haven, 1998), p. 215
(3) Ziegler, Ulf Erdmann (Art in America, N.Y.) January 1996, p. 81
(4) Lewis, p. 215
Michael Stevenson
Research Assistant
Graduate Student - Painting and Drawing
Fall 1997
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