A measure of how far we have descended into political nightmare came to me this week when I looked at a remarkable, monumental painting by George Grosz called “Eclipse of the Sun,” just hung at the Neue Galerie in New York City (86th Street and Fifth Avenue), and to be exhibited there until Monday, Sept. 2. The current show at the Neue of German Expressionist artists’ self portraits (Beckmann, Kokoschka, Kirchner, etc.) was why I was there, but a trip to the floor below added an unexpected shock to the system: George Grosz.
I think of George Grosz as one of the legendary artist teachers at the Art Students League where I studied, and I also remember his unpleasantly bitter caricatures of the rich and powerful, those victimized by them, the twisted horrors of war—all the painful baggage he brought with him when he fled Germany to live in the U.S. in 1933.
His work always seemed to me extreme, grotesque, derived from a ghastly world far away. And because he favored caricature and graphic expression, I—and maybe the art world itself—saw him as a lesser figure.
But there in front of me hung this large painting: men seated around a table, at the head of which and dominating in his size and colorfulness was Hindenburg, president of Weimar Germany, teeth bared and in military splendor, the man who appointed Hitler as German chancellor in 1933. The men around the table are headless, though decked out in tuxes and spats. Weaponry is being sold. Prison bars underfoot hold gray captives and skeletal bones. Above, the city is burning and the sun overseeing this scene is eclipsed by a dollar sign. What struck me was the fierce angry truth of this hundred-year-old painting—nothing remote about it in the Trumpian era. It was like a knife in the heart, of recognition, of the sense that we, too, are there, as threatened by similar horrors and dangers, corruption everywhere one looks. Grosz’ “extreme” vision unbelievably now registers here as straight realism.
This painting was lent to the Neue Galerie by the Hecksher Museum in Huntington on Long Island (Grosz lived in Huntington for 12 years.) In 2009, the museum was going to sell the painting (which it bought for a song) to pay for an expansion—until something radically changed its sense of the painting’s importance. Grosz painted it in 1926 Berlin and took it with him as he was on the run.
After his death it was found, rolled up in the garage of a neighborhood house painter, used for barter for a $104 job by a penurious artist with a family. Seemingly too foreign perhaps, and figurative in decades when the U.S. art world was dominated by abstraction, “Eclipse of the Sun” is a great painting that never received the recognition it deserved until very recently. The terrible truth it sees and reports couldn’t be more apposite, along with the beauty of how it’s structured and painted. Entrance to the Neue Galerie is a bit pricey, but to sweeten the painfulness a little, there’s wonderful strudel and Viennese cream cakes to be had in the beautiful cafe overlooking Central Park. If you’re in New York, it’s worth the effort.
