painting
The Writer Walter Mehring
George Grosz
About this work
Object details
- TitleThe Writer Walter Mehring
- Date1926
- Mediumoil on canvas
- Measurements110 × 79,5 cm
- Inventory number2454
- Inscriptionsverso, upper middle: Grosz April 1926
More about this work
By around 1926 George Grosz and his good friend Walter Mehring, one of the most important satirical authors of the German Weimar Republic, had grown out of their absurdist Dada meetings in Berlin. After the horrors of the First World War, Nihilism and anti-art had made way for a more traditional form of representation, a New Objectivity. That ‘stylistic label’ was minted in 1924-1925 by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. He saw that visual artists like Grosz, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix were displaying a new, emotionally detached interest in their portrait sitters. It was a style of portraiture that was also called Verism
Mehring is gazing straight ahead with a dreamy look, as if the painter and viewer are not present. His pose and the respectable Polsterstuhl in which he is sitting have an air of obstinacy about them. They constitute a beacon of stability against a vague but menacing background with the outlines of a ruin, representing a past that the artist and sitter would prefer not to know. This portrait wants to shake mankind awake. It was not just a commentary on the past war and growing social inequality, but also on the shattered utopias of prewar modernism. Free, German Expressionism was discarded, and now merely forms the decor for a renewed interest in structure, line and moderate tonality.
Mehring’s cigarette points towards the sun piercing the clouds. A small sign of hope? Or a harbinger of yet more catastrophe to come? In the Weimar Republic Germany’s economic problems were exacerbated by reparations after the First World War, as was social disorder. It was the ideal breeding ground for the rise of the National Socialist party and the later Führer, Adolf Hitler.
According to the Nazis, painters and writers who were social commentators had to be silenced. Avant-garde art was stigmatised as ‘degenerate’, and thousands of works of art and writings were censored, confiscated, sold or even burned. In 1939, this portrait of Mehring and 124 other ‘degenerate’ works of art were auctioned in Lucerne in Switzerland. The Royal Museums of Brussels and Antwerp joined forces with the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Liège to bring 16 artworks to Belgium. The Mehring portrait came to the KMSKA, together with paintings by Lovis Corinth, Carl Hofer and Jules Pascin.
Mocked as ‘cultural Bolshevists’, Grosz and Mehring fled to America, where they wrote their memoirs. In 2010, Grosz’s portrait adorned the cover of the Dutch re-edition of Mehring’s autobiographical De verloren bibliotheek (The lost library) of 1953. Grosz’s 1946 autobiography was published in New York in 1955 as A little Yes and a big No.
References
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