Art is in Danger!Posted on November 30, 1999, 12:00 am, by George Grosz, under Commentary.

George Grosz, Berlin 1925

http://www.artmutt.org/1999/11/art-is-in-danger/

Anyone considering the art of today will find it a crazy, confusing subject. It’s not easy to criticize it correctly.

These days, with their contradictions and pitched battles, give rise to comparable struggles in art. How does art appear today?

Let’s enter the arena of art! A bizarre crowd – ranging from the pathetic to the eccentric buffoon, often cheerful and content, yet at times bickering and combative to the point where there are broken brushes and bent compasses – a great commotion everywhere. We find business, advertising, sound effects, but also noble detachment, resignation, escapism. A whole range of individuals in the heart of the academy. And art publications of every form – triangular, square, oblong – each combatting the other, and all filled’with problems and theories. One picks them up and asks, which of these does know the true meaning of art: “Der Sturm?” “Der Kunstwart?” “art®?” “Der Cicerone?” “Kunst und Kunstler?” “G?” “Das Kunstblatt?”

There’s one group which defies all tradition. Wildly ecstatic, they brandish their instruments and paint as barbarically as aborigines. Others are over-whelmingly Gothic, or zealously Catholic, while another bunch will declare itself Zionist or Buddhist. Others go back to old Tuscany. Stimulated by the old masters, they revive the elegant and the slender with a slight Parisian sauciness. Even the Cubists with their eternal guitars are reluctant to die out. Lately, though, the Classical has gone up in price, and Ingres, Flaxmann, Poussin and Genelli have begun to rise from the grave. Also the Futurists, worshippers of simultaneity and sound effects. Still others put together a cosmopolitan conglomeration of old Russian ikons and Cubism. And many (honesty being the best policy) dispense with innovation and experimentation altogether; they stick to home cooking. The research into optics and color by the Impressionists (e.g. the detail method of the Japanese: Mount Fuji as seen through a fishnet). The experiments of Pointillism and Neopointillism are ever new. Others swear by Lübi, Lehnbach, Menzel or Defregger. And the pastey stroke of Trübner is, especially in southern Germany, highly valued. Even painters of the soil, such as Eichler, Putz, Erler, and the 100% German painters Karl Vinnen and Hans Thoma, as well as recluses like Kubin, Ensor and Doms still believe in hexes and fairies despite the automobile and the radio. And not to be forgotten are those painters who dwell in the great exhibits, the masters of oversized society portraits, of representational paintings, of life-sized horses and madonnas; they are honored, given medals and ribbons, recognized and valued by the elite. And, last but not least, the panoramic and gallery painters. They too are called artists. And why not? It’s only a small circle that would deny them that designation.

Whose opinion is correct? Which viewpoint will be confirmed? How do artists, the ‘sensitive antennae of society,’ express themselves today? How and where does one determine their influence?

Never has art been more off-putting than it is now, especially for the common man of today, who claims he can live without art. Whatever one understands art to be, it’s clear that its overriding task is to satisfy man’s living Bildhunger (yearning for images). This Bildhunger persists today, more than ever, within the masses. And it’s going to be satisfied in an unprecedented way, but not by our display window conception of art. Photographs and motion pictures will be sufficient to meet this need.

The twilight of art began with the invention of photography. Art forfeited its right to report the world. The romantic longings of the masses are satisfied at the movies, where they can get their fill of love, ambition, the exotic unknown and nature. Whoever enjoys newsreels or historical splendors pays his own way in: the sovereign with or without silk hat; the murderer and thief, Haarman; gymnastics exhibitions and memorial services, our wonderful countryside – it’s all there. Hindenburg’s sorrow-through-fear countenance is a humanity no Rembrandt or Durer ever captured. No Michelangelo created Dempsey’s muscles.

The objection will be raised that this is not the essence of art – how the artist’s eye sees, and how he translates what he sees – but a matter of heart, of soul. This objection holds that journalism has no role in art today. And that therefore, to see today’s world, one should go to the movies, not to an art exhibit. And that at the movies you will only find half of art. Yet for most people it is the more important half, and it is more complete than ever. The other half is limited to the subtleties, the spiritualities and nobilities of our forefathers’ art, an art the better half which reported as much then as it does now. Very little.

Technologically, man is progressing at a brisk pace. The film-half of art is no longer confined to a rectangular canvas. Neatly confined to a rectangular canvas. Neatly packaged, today’s artworks lie in a small cylinder and _can appear (another advantage) simultaneously in New York, Berlin, London, Paris, and just as easily in the most remote village. In comparison, how laborious and antiquated the creation of an oil painting appears. How quaint. In film the work is also fresher, and its making does not depend on the talent of one individual. Many minds work on it, and thereby the film more easily achieves a social character. More easily than the individual handwork of an artist does. Incidentally, problems of light and motion, which were only partly solved by painters, present no difficulty In film. How can a painting compare, really, with a film of a moving ocean? The painting is a boring affair; at best it is only more or less well done.

Many of our painters have observed this. Some have recognized the superior reproductive capacity of the technical sciences and have therefore assigned them the task of imitating nature. Immersed in their own worlds, they imagine themselves beyond the world of reality, and so they follow after the ‘orphic resonances’ of their own souls. The soul should win that particular race.

Many expressionists have started from this point. Honorable, somewhat richly talented men. Kandinsky made music, projecting the music of the soul on canvas. Paul Klee crocheted tender girlish handiwork on the Biedemeyer sewing table. The only representational subject matter that remained for so-called pure art was that of the painter’s own emotions. Consequently, the true painter had to paint his inner life. Here the disaster began: The result: 77 directions for art, everyone claiming to paint the true soul.

There were also groups that saw that this wouldn’t work (the soul is too vacillating an image) and so, with burning zeal, they set themselves to work on other problems: simultaneity; motion; rhythm! Naturally this turned out to be a futile sort of idealism: simultaneity and motion cannot be expressed adequately on canvas.

And here lay the beginnings of new perceptions. Some pressed on and began to ‘construct.’ Although some spoke of dynamics, in short order they discovered that the most immediate expression of that was in the dry drawings of the engineer. So the soul and metaphysical speculation were driven out by the compass and the ruler. Constructivism came into play. It saw with greater clarity. It didn’t go off on metaphysical flights. Its aims were free of archaic, outworn prejudices. The Constructivists wanted objectivity, wanted to work in terms of concrete necessities. They upheld an art whose goals and method could be construed, perceived and verified.

Unfortunately the Constructivists have a practical failing – they’re falling short of their goal. In most cases they’re still confined within the traditional sphere of art. They forget that, as a rule, there is only one type of constructivist: the engineer, the architect, the welder, the carpenter. In a word, the technician. They set out to be leaders – but were, it turns out, only a reflex. The more honest among them put so-called art aside and focussed their energy on the real basis of constructivism: the industrial economy. But in trying to save the precious word ‘art,’ they have compromised it. Furniture from the Weimar Bauhaus is probably wellconstructed. But one would rather sit on a chair factory-produced by anonymous carpenters – it would be more comfortable than one designed by a romantic, decadent Bauhaus engineer. Constructivism logically led to the engineer. Constructivism logically led to the down-grading of artists. It led to the occupations of construction engineer, architect and design engineer, the real creators of our time. In Russia, this constructivist romanticism has a deeper meaning and is more thoroughly socially conditioned than in western Europe. In Russia, Constructivism is, in part, a natural reflex of the powerful machine-oriented offensive of industrialization. For the farmer the experience of electric power, of red-painted tractors of the Kees Company, of turbines, is utterly novel and unheardof. There, the canvasses combining spiritual and mechanical construction are not as purposeless as in western Europe. The suggestive power of the machine aesthetic, the (to the layman) almost supernatural secrets of technology, served as a starting point for the masses, who have responded more emotionally than rationally. The artist is (even if unconsciously) a mediator and recruiter for the ideas generated by industrial development. I (George Grosz) am personally persuaded that, in the state academy in Moscow, a study section has been established where there is instruction in physics and mechanics so that, in many cases, these artists are called ‘technical students.’ In

this way a more genuine ‘constructivist’ will be made of the art student whose primary attraction to the beauty of technology has been emotional.

In the West, art can no longer fulfill such tasks. Here technology does not have to be detoured through art. For the masses, both in the city and in the country, technology has long been commonplace.

Then what’s to be done? Everything said so far leads to one conclusion: the liquidation of art. Of course, this is not a satisfactory way to resolve the situation. But why so? The aforementioned introspective nature of art seems capable of another focus, one that doesn’t demand that the artist have an antiquated mind. Art is not just a mood; it’s an ancient impulse which man, often in dire need, persists in. Man believes wholeheartedly that there is yet something to be said that only an artist can say, something that must be said. Even if an artist’s contemporaries will not hear him, there is the consolation that perhaps, after his death, a future generation will grant recognition to his work. Even today, a centennial exhibit suddenly thrusts some name into the light of day, and the if not today art market is taken by surprise – caught then tommorrow out by the fame of one who was, in his own lifetime, misunderstood.

Genuine self-confidence in their ability to create something of lasting value gives those artists the strength to endure the indifference or rejection of their contemporaries. It’s an astonishing fact that any number of highly accomplished men will work a lifetime, fruitlessly, clinging to the twin concepts of future and eternity. (Presumably, by overlooking the cares and petty details of daily life, one grasps the ‘essential.’) The lucky ones see, in their own lifetime, their work hung in a private gallery or two, possibly even in a museum.

Should this be the end we work toward: to be admired in galleries? The very idea (Grünewald had his Isenheimer Altar exhibited near Cassirer) shows quite blatantly the problematical situation of artists in contemporary society. Material deprivation bespeaks an idealism, a passion for the future, for eternity.

The point is, then, to figure what the artist imagines the future to be (eternity is really just an extension of the present). Obviously he isn’t hoping for recognition from a future that is distinct from the people of that future. If people in the future are unchanged from what they were during the artist’s lifetime, then he has no reason to expect the posthumous recognition that he hopes for. For the future to be different, the people must be different. Yes, the unspoken hope of every artist who strives for future recognition is that mankind will discover new standards and form new opinions. And surely the artist will help in this. For his own sake and for that of his work, he will help bring about this change. Many are convinced that, in some mysterious way, this will come about.

And so we have a paradox: those anemic, long-haired, peculiar men in their studios, men who couldn’t throw a stone at a cat, who live in dread of the cleaning lady, and who are devastated by the bind their work is in … those very same men are furthering progress!?

I too have been one of those peculiar people. I want to discuss the revolutionary aspects of my development, now, to encourage artists to work independently of contemporary reaction.

For a long time it has been acceptable to say that a real painter must be ignorant. Must he be? Don’t we consider the artist’s knowledge of the world to be the most advanced in the nation? Should ‘the most worldly wise in the nation’ confine themselves to the cultivation of their feelings while leaving the rest to ignorant clods, who have neither information nor understanding? And even if the artists are correct – to be a revolutionary, is it enough to paint year in and year out hoping for a better future? My own opinion is that artists don’t have the right to do that. An artist must expand his knowledge and understanding, and do so personally, in response to the danger we face. It is no longer sufficient to love; one must also learn to hate.

When I began consciously to experience the world, I soon found that there wasn’t a whole lot to the gaiety or glitter of life. Nor, above all, to my fellow human beings. Consequently I became a vague idealist and a true romantic; I felt cut-off, isolated. Unwittingly, I overrated art and came to have a distorted view of it. I had blinders on both eyes. I despised mankind. I saw everything from the perspective of my little studio. I was surrounded by smalltime merchants, home owners and shopkeepers whose talk and ideas disgusted me. I became a righteous misanthrope and a skeptical individualist. Foolish and misinformed as I was, I felt I had a monopoly on knowledge and awareness. I was proud of myself. I even believed I could see through the stupidity that lay all around me, like a fog. The sketches I did in those days express that hatred. For example, I drew a Stammtisch (daily gathering of friends at a table set aside for them) in a beer hall where men sat packed together like thick red masses of flesh in ugly gray slacks. To achieve a style that would render clearly and bluntly the harshness and coldness of my subjects, I studied the crudest manifestations of the artistic impulse: I copied graffiti, the folklore of men’s rooms. They struck me as the most direct expression, and succinct translation, of strong feelings.

Even children’s drawings stimulated me with their single-mindedness. Thus I gradually developed the knife-edged line I needed to record my observations, which at that time were misanthropic. Herein lay the danger: to get bogged down in the stylization of the drawings. As a countermeasure I tried fluid nature studies, which I’d neglected for a long time. I admired the Japanese, who observed nature with an unbroken ease. I found their wood-cuts full of life. It was especially gratifying that most depicted daily life. Even so, it was Toulouse-Lautrec who inspired me. But I also enjoyed ancient woodcuts, where I found striking expressions in the simplest of lines. I made jottings on the street, in cafes, in music halls, and afterwards I analyzed my impression in writing. Once, before the war, I’d planned a large three volume work, The Grotesqueness of the Germans. But I couldn’t get an advance to get started on it, and Malik Verlag didn’t yet exist.

I was in Paris for a short time. Paris didn’t make any special impression on me, and I never shared others’ overestimation of that city.

In the time before the War my views could have been summed up as follows … People are pigs. All talk of ethics is a fraud, meant only for the stupid. Life has no

purpose except to satisfy one’s hunger for food and women. There is no soul. All that matters are the necessities of life. Most importantly, man has no worth. It is necessary to shove and elbow your way through life, but it’s also disgusting … So my work expressed a strong loathing of life, and this was overcome only by my interest in the works themselves. When the loathing got to be too much, I got drunk.

The outbreak of the War made it clear to me that the masses, who were marching wildly cheering through the streets, were under the influence of the press and the military, and had no will of their own. The will of the politicians and generals dominated them. As for myself, I was aware of these overpowering forces, but I was not cheering, because I saw that my individual freedom was now threatened. I wanted to live apart from mankind and its demands. Instead, against my will, I was forced into the military along with the rest.

My hate focussed on the cause of all this. I considered the war a monstrous, degenerate manifestation of the everyday scramble for possessions. This war was, in its particulars, repulsive to me, and in general it was even more so. But I could not keep myself from being turned into a Prussian soldier. To my astonishment I discovered that the people were not as enthusiastic about the war as I’d thought. I despised them a little less. And my sense of isolation began to diminish somewhat. My life as a soldier inspired many of my drawings. A few comrades clearly enjoyed these. As they shared in my feelings, I found their attention preferable to the recognition of this or that collector who would appraise my work only from the standpoint of a speculator.

Because I had made friends I was, for the first time, drawing with the awareness that others shared my views and experiences. I began to realize it was better to work for more than myself and my art dealer. I wanted to become an illustrator, a journalist. High art, insofar as it’s concerned with depicting the beauty of the world, interested me less than before. I began looking to tendency artists and moralists: Hogarth, Goya, Daumier and similar artists. Although much occupied with the lively conflicts taking place among new art trends, I couldn’t share in the general indifference which people in those circles had regarding social events. I sketched and painted, beset with contradictions, and tried through my work to picture the world in its utter ugliness, sickness and despair. I had no apparent success at that time. I considered myself an out-and-out revolutionary. I imagined my resentment to be awareness.

Yet the war didn’t bring about any fundamental changes. Again I mistrusted friendship. Anything like camaraderie didn’t suit my world. I didn’t want to have any illusions. Then I began to hear of revolutionary movements, but unfortunately I had no direct contact with them and so remained skeptical: one needed only look at the S.P.D., which was supporting the great brotherhood of man and war credit allocations, and all in one breath. That was the reality. I saw it. No more Swedenborgian hell and demonic power for me! I was seeing the real devils: men in trousers, with beards, with and without medals and ribbons. As for the hopes many of my friends had for peace and revolution, I considered them groundless.

Once again a civilian, I experienced the earliest days of the Dada movement in Berlin. Its beginning coincided with the turning point of Germany, winter 1917,

known in popular terms as the ‘Turnip Winter’ (Die Zeit der Kohlrube, because of the food shortage).

This German Dada movement had its roots in the awareness (which I and most of my comrades had come to) that it was irrational to believe that ‘spirit’ ruled the world. Imagine Goethe in a barrage of gunfire, Nietzsche with a field pack, Jesus in the trenches! Yet there are still people who hold that spirit and art are powers unto themselves.

Dadaism has been the only substantial artistic movement in Germany in the past hundred years. Don’t laugh. Compared with this movement, all other ‘isms’ in art seem like minor studio affairs. Dadaism was not a made-up movement; rather it was an organic reaction to the head-in-the-c1ouds tendency of so-called high art, whose devotees meditated over Cubism and ‘the gothic’ while the field marshals did their own painting with blood. Dadaism forced all those who were really interested in art to do the same.

[Dada exterminator ] What did Dadaism do? It held that it doesn’t matter whether one simply bats the breeze or recites a son net by Petrarch, Shakespeare or Rilke; or whether one polishes boot heels or paints madonnas: there will still be shootings, still be profiteering, still be hunger. What is art for? Was it not the height of deception to pretend that high art creates spiritual values? Were not artists incredibly ridiculous, taking themselves seriously when no one else would? “Hands off high art!” cried the opponents of Dadaism. “Art is in danger! The spirit will be defiled.” How could they babble on about spirit, when such spirit as there was was worthless. The press was writing: Buy War Bonds. As far as art and artists are concerned, they are happy when they have only to repaint, daily, with beauty and fascination, the increasingly exposed face of Anno 13.

I, along with the other founders of German Dadaism, know today that our main error was to have been too preoccupied with so-called art. Dadaism was a mocking break with a narrow, overrated milieu that was too highly regarded. But it only swayed in midair, suspended between the classes. It could not assume the responsibilities of both classes at once. At that time we saw the mad end-product of the ruling social order, and we burst out laughing. We didn’t see, yet, that there was a system underlying the madness.

The nearby revolution made us gradually aware of this system. There was no further occasion for laughter; there were more pressing problems than those regarding art. The problem of art must be put into perspective. Having overcome the rhetoric of art, we found we had lost a number of our Dadaists, mainly in Switzerland and France. They had experienced the social upheavals of the past decade through – from the perspective of – the newspapers. The rest of us saw our work cut-out for us: to produce tendency art in the service of the revolutionary cause.

In the art world today the call for tendency is still met with indignant, disdainful protest. This happens to be the case now, perhaps, even more than in the past. True, it is conceded that in every era there have been artworks with a tendentious character. Yet still such works are judged not with regard to their tendency but to their formal, ‘purely artistic’ qualities. The people who make such judgments fail

utterly to understand that every work of art in every era embodies a tendency; all that has been changed IS the clear-cut character of this tendentiousness. A few rough, sketchy examples: the Greeks promoted ‘the beautiful man’; sports, physical culture, served as a cohesive factor; Eros, their religious outlook. In a word, this comprised the ’100% Greek.’ The Gothic was instructed by Christian propaganda. In the Middle Ages, artists created what pleased the kings, the patricians and merchants. The primitive caveman, the aborigine, have their idols, their hunting and sexual art. Today we understand, and adhere to, what is material. We may distinguish countless tendencies. A few examples: Menzel is the painter of Prussia and of early German industrialization; Defregger idealizes retail merchants, and loyalty to the home, and brings forth cheerful stories. Delacroix paints what is cosmopolitan, what is supported by history and tradition, and is for heroism, progress and a powerful France. Toulouse-Lautrec saw through the celebrated French tourist/pleasure scene, revealing it as bourgeois eroticism. Gauguin, tired of civilization, believes like Seume in ‘Better Game,’ and propagandizes for romantic individualism. Angelo Jank paints the equestrian pastimes of the aristocracy. Hodler promotes spiritualism, metaphysical monism, respect for historic exploits and heroic passions. Kokoschka propagandized for the ‘sublime,’ complicated, decadent “Last Citizens,” the bourgeoisie and their problems. Hans Thoma is enamored of harmless, rustic, dreamy men, idealized nature and homelife. He advocates complete indifference to concrete interests and social questions.

These examples should be sufficient to show thal tendency in art is the rule, not the exception. Of course artists are not always conscious of the tendencies in their work, but this doesn’t lessen the effect. One may determine the tendencies of any artist simply by knowing his or her works in relation to the world in which that artist lived. There are also artists who deliberately try to avoid every tendency they’re aware of, in particular renouncing those that are troublesome. Often they believe one should create instinctively, without premeditation, as nature does, which gives form and color to plants, crystals, stones, to all that exists. They give their paintings incomprehensible names or just plain numbers. Clearly, what underlies these tactics is the attempt (similar to that in music) to limit all possible reactions to a work of art to one reaction: simple fascination. The painter is nothing but the creator of form and color. Whether these artists believe that their work has no ‘deeper meaning,’ or that it is given an emotional or metaphysical significance by the observer, the fact remains: they deny the very possibility that artists are influenced by ideology (be it eroticism, religion, politics, aesthetics, morals, etc.). Regarding social events, they’re silent as well as indifferent and irresponsible; or, in those cases where it’s not intentional, they work in ignorance and impotence.

Assuming these artists enter the service of industry and the applied arts, there is little to object to. As in the case of a politician who keeps busy, proving himself a hard worker, the question is simply one of aptitude: how well he does what he does.

To the extent that this form of art (so appealing to the literal-minded) is self generated, it will serve as propaganda for blase indifference and irresponsible individuality.

So the relation of the artist to the world is excluded from his work and, without fail, denied altogether. When one accuses an artist of being tendentious in his work, this

accusation can be justified only to the extent that the tendency contradicts the unconscious views of the artist as revealed in and through his style – or when he tries to compensate for ineptitude by tacking on a tendentious motif or title. It seems everyone with insufficient talent advocates a tendency which he is fully convinced is right. But one cannot point to insufficient ability as reason to oppose, across the board, tendency in art. One almost never hears that Grutzner has painted propaganda for German beer or for the contentment of the monastic life, or that Grunewald’s theme is based on his Christian beliefs. When critics try to belittle a work by calling attention to its tendentiousness, they’re not criticizing the work of the artist but the idea for which it stands.

The artist, even if he neither wants it nor knows it, lives in a constant interrelationship with the public and with society. He cannot escape the laws which govern their development, especially not today when, these laws are determined by class struggle. When distinguished artists remain aloof from society, their indifference and otherworldliness automatically supports the class which is in power. In Germany, that class is the bourgeoisie. Moreover large numbers of artists consciously support the world bourgeois order, given that only within that world order does their work have any value.

In November 1918, when the tide seemed to turn, suddenly the most isolated, esoteric brushes discovered their hearts were beating for the working masses, and for a few months red and pink allegories and pamphlets were turned out in great numbers. And they held their own in the art market. But soon law and order were restored, and what do you know … our artists made their way, as quietly as possible, back to the higher spheres. “What do you want from us! We’re still revolutionary. But the workers, they’ve given up! They’re all philistines. There’s no way to make a revolution in this country!” And so they brood in their studios over the ‘real’ revolutionary problems: form, color and style.

Of course, formal revolution had long ago lost its purpose. The modern bourgeois has digested everything; from him, nothing is safe. The merchant of today is different from the merchant of Gustav Freytag’s time. This one is cold, distant. He hangs radical works on the walls of his apartment. The catchphrase is, don’t be old-fashioned, adapt quickly and without thinking. His art must be in the latest style. He lacks any notion of responsibility or mission. He’s sober, realistic to the point of proceeding in a stupor, skeptical, without illusions, greedy. He understands only his goods. There are specialists for understanding the rest: philosophy, ethics, art, all the stuff of culture. Exports determine what is fashionable and the rest accept it. The formal revolutionary, the ‘wanderer in a void,’ hasn’t done too badly. Despite superficial differences, he and the merchant are closely related, sharing the same indifferent, arrogant perspectives.

Anyone to whom the revolutionary concerns of the workers are not merely an expression (or “a beautiful, but unfortunately impractical, idea”) cannot be content to work on harmless or formal problems. He will struggle to express the revolutionary ideas of the workers, to measure the worth of his work in terms of its social usefulness and effectiveness – not according to some arbitrary, individualistic principle of art, nor by the work’s ‘success.’

To summarize: the meaning, essence and history of art stand in direct relationship to the meaning, essence and history of society. The prerequisite for awareness and criticism of art in our time is awareness of the realities and relationships of real life in all its upheavals and tensions. Humankind has been in control of the earth’s means of production, on a large scale, for a century now. At the same time, the struggle for possession of these means has grown ever more inclusive, drawing all men, without exception, into its storm. On one side there are workers, paid employees, civil servants; on the other there are shareholders, entrepreneurs, merchants and financiers. The rest form a buffer zone between the two fronts. This struggle for existence, which divides humankind into exploiting and exploited halves, is called in its clearest and final form: class struggle.

Art is, indeed, in danger.

The artist of today, if he doesn’t want to evade the issues, or become an empty shell, must choose between technology and service in the class war. Either way, he must give up ‘pure art.’ Either he joins the ranks of architects, engineers and ad men whom the industrial powers employ and the world exploits, or he becomes a depicter and critic who critiques the face of our time, becoming a propagandist and defender of revolutionary ideas and of their supporters in the army of the oppressed those who struggle for their just share of the world’s resources, and for a meaningful social order.

- George Grosz, 1925

Translation Copyright 1987 Paul Gorrell