Hopper and Grosz

Introduction: 2002

Attacks upon what is loosely termed 'Modern Art' or 'Modernism' are
among the staples of right-wing or conservative writing, and have been
so for most of the last century. Whether it is the late
Victorian/Edwardian establishment decrying the startling and
revolutionary palette of Matisse or Roger Scruton debunking abstraction
as 'Kitsch' in the City Journal, this particular 'movement' if it can
be so termed, has continued to arouse derision and fury in
reactionaries throughout Europe.

Ironically, one of the earliest targets of this backlash was the
aforementioned Matisse, for whom the motive and rewards for producing
art were largely material and whilst being aesthetically luscious, were
quite vacuous in the political-cultic sense. More bourgeois even than
some of his detractors, he sought only to provide luxurious images for
the fatigued city businessman to contemplate. A few decades later the
Dada-influenced George Grosz was a hate figure, a kind of
pornographer-in-chief to the denizens of the Los Von Weimar movement
and later the Nazi government. Of course the feeling was mutual and
these reactionary archetypes were a large part of the subject matter
for Grosz's savage satires. Alongside or despite of Hitler and his
destruction of culture, contemporary conservatives such as Stuart
Northwood have continued this assault on his work. But the patron saint
of 'degenerate artists' was and remains Picasso, also the greatest
Modernist and one of the greatest painters of the last century.

Many of the 'New' Modern Art trendies bankrolled by the Saatchis - and
I follow the likes of Matthew Collings in drawing a distinction between
'Old' and 'New' Modernism - follow in the van of the likes of the
infantile coprophiliac Dali emulators Gilbert and George or that
overrated hologram Andy Warhol. They can be compared to Chris Ofili's
ornate Turner Prize winning compositions in being so to speak, so much
elephant crap. The 'New' Modernist establishment remains as
self-consciously impenetrable to ordinary working people as any Mayfair
gentleman's club or Harley Street surgery, its spurious output the
death rattle of a fundamentally hollow and useless 'Post-modern'
worldview. 'New' Modernist subject matter ranges from the banal - rows
of breezeblocks and shopping lists - to the plain scatological -
witness the erstwhile Miss Ermin's effluvia-stained bed.

In stark contrast the 'Old' Modern Art of men like Grosz and Hopper was
truly revolutionary and awe-inspiring. It is in this spirit and in a
moment of genuine over-boiling enthusiasm, that I wrote the following
piece, intended for Populist Press (note the party-political references
throughout). It was either rejected or never presented.

December 1998:

Long neglected by politically-minded people, or mis-represented by the
fashionable yuppie middle classes, modern art has in the past acted as
a dynamic precursor of socio-economic change. We must hope that it can
again be energized in such a fashion. The farcical scenes at the 1998
Turner Prize ceremony, during which an exhibitor of the finest elephant
ordure competed for the favours of the art world glitterati with a
photographer who specialised in twisting skinny and listless models
from the Observer magazine into shapes of her own choosing, can be
forgotten for a moment. If populism is nostalgic, it looks to every
historical period for beacons of hope to light the way towards the
achievement of its aims. Through the works of two great men, George
Grosz and Edward Hopper; one a German communist and the other an
American precursor of the spirit of Frank Capra; we can illuminate both
the history of radical art itself and our own philosophy, being as it
is a synthesis of the pro-working class dynamism of Grosz and the more
gentle poignancy of Hopper.

Each class in Britain has its own financial misdemeanours - for the
wealthy they are 'indiscretions' or 'irregularities', committed in the
name of greed and self-aggrandizement; for the poor they often take the
form of defaulting on loan repayments or Council Tax bills, are
condemned as 'crimes' and the offenders (or more accurately, victims)
usually women, receive a few months behind bars. The legal and
political establishment obviously views the need for greater quantities
of port and cigars with more tenderness than the needs of materially
and emotionally dependent working class children.

The great German artist George Grosz, whose most famous works were
produced during the years of the Weimar Republic, illuminated the
fallacies of the capitalist worldview, with the rich blessed and the
poor damned regardless of their relative moral natures, and illustrated
why he remains an icon both for lovers of the modern art aesthetic and
for men and women involved in the daily struggle for a better life for
working people. Many of Grosz's paintings often graphically depicted
middle class sexual immorality and double standards, and herein lies
the tendency of many extreme-right super philistines to bluntly dismiss
him either as a pornographer pure and simple or as the cloven hoof of
many of the worst types of post-war modern 'art' a la Warhol, Hirst and
Gilbert and George. Such condemnations not only display the inability
of certain writers to view art through non-ideological spectacles, they
reveal a startling ignorance of art as history, its great achievements
standing as breathtaking and visually stunning historical documents
which appeal to the gut emotions of ordinary people rather than the
often high-handed and pompous world of academia.

Grosz found himself in a vacillating liberal republic that lacked the
spirit to crush its most dangerous opponents. The Weimar government had
also lost the trust of more progressive elements with its disgraceful
actions in recruiting the Frei Korps and allowing the murder of the
Spartacist leaders after the abortive revolt of 1919. Grosz's
detestation both of the political state of affairs in Germany and of
the middle-class oligarchy of church, capitalists, the military and
reactionary nationalists that had led the country to disaster in the
Great War comes strongly to the fore in his works of this period. Along
with his colleague John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfelde - he had
Anglicised his name in protest at the war, and in particularly the
military dictatorship of 1916), George Grosz produced a veritable
almanac of life in Weimar Germany, expressed through clenched
teeth.

'The Bodies of the Victims are Washed Ashore'(1920) is a case in point.
The Frei Korps are here not the heroic defenders of civilization as
depicted in proto-fascist mythology - they are unshaven, hideously
ugly, pock-marked. The victims in question are Luxemburg and
Liebknecht. 'Grey Day' (1921) depicts the essential ignorance and
stupidity of the corpulent and self-satisfied middle classes as they
build walls to separate themselves from the destitute ex-servicemen and
workers who several years earlier were vaunted as Germany's saviours.
Again and again, the supposed erudition, moral superiority and
intellectual heroism that makes up the self-image of every ruling class
is pilloried for the shallow double-standard it is. '5 a.m.' is a
bitter attack on the perversions of ruling elites - being often the
worst examples of sexual infantilism and sado-masochism, the ascendancy
of an anarchic capitalist system manifested as pornographic
brutality.

The inter-war contest between reactionary interests and the ineffectual
Weimar government combined in Grosz's palette to create an overwhelming
feeling of chaos and impending catastrophe - he followed surrealist and
cubist painters in producing visions of urban centres which bordered or
transcended the line between morose ambivalence and open terror. His
was also one of the few tragically unheeded voices that warned of the
potential danger presented by the charismatic Hitler, as displayed
prophetically in 'The Agitator' (1926). Perhaps his best-known work,
'The Pillars of Society' (1926), takes its cue unmistakeably from
Bosch, assembling, collage-style, various archetypes of bourgeois greed
and self-satisfaction.

There are few noted artists who had the epithet 'modern' attached to
themselves that can be seen as possessing a relevance to the culturally
conservative. Edward Hopper joins his American literary contemporaries
TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos in representing that
quintessentially inter-war definition of the word. As an emotionally
crippled post-1918 generation witnessed the rise of two omnipotent
ideologies, diametrically opposed but promising essentially the same
centralized, anti-individual vision of coming decades, they sought new
forms and ideas to challenge existing states of affairs, whilst always
casting a poignant glance at a slowly vanishing world.

When the concepts of 'automation' and 'hygiene' consumed the minds of a
rising elite of scientific and political luminaries, men such as Hopper
helped to constitute the conservative rearguard. The essence of his
work depicting a series of fleeting moments in time is illuminated when
we consider his ability to view both the past and the future
simultaneously. These two spatial terms are routinely represented by
physical symbols in his paintings. In 'Gas'(1940) a solitary gas
station worker is depicted as an island of industrious and honest
humanity amidst two powerful tides - his own man-made edifices, which
we may call 'civilization'; and the adjacent forest, dark and
forbidding, representing 'nature'. Again in 'Sunday' (1926) a lonely,
bowed figure sits despondently amidst what appears to be an abandoned
town: the shop windows behind him are bereft of goods; the streets
before him are empty. Hopper repeatedly used these dichotomies to
suggest that, in his quest for greater efficiency in an increasingly
competitive capitalist West, 'rational' man risked alienating himself
not only from the natural world but from his own artificial
environment. Industrial development is thus represented as the ultimate
Pyrrhic victory.

In works depicting moments in the life of urban America, such as
'Office at Night' (1940) we see this plaintive protest in different
forms. The characters are in physical proximity to each other, but
there is little in the way of psychological or emotional empathy
between them. Again, in 'Office in a Small City' (1953), the solitary
clerk occupies his space in the office block in a physical sense only:
the office window which he gazes out of - lost in metaphysical
contemplation - represents the stark boundary between the open blue sky
he yearns for and the civilization he has helped to create but from
which he longs to escape. Such melancholy scenes create the impression
of a state of affairs in which ill-conceived urbanisation and the
increasing availability and expansion of rail, sea and air travel at
previously unimagined speeds, were combining to rob Americans of the
blessings of community and settled values.

Hopper was also noted for his poignant depictions of individual
buildings - striking in their elegance and understated beauty, standing
as monuments to a rapidly vanishing way of life - in the case of
'Cobb's Barns, South Truro (1933), the message is one of sorrow at the
devastation brought to the lives of American farmers during the
depression. In 'Lighthouse Hill' (1927), we witness Hopper's tribute to
the Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse Station near Portland, Maine, which had
been earmarked for demolition, despite the protests of local seamen.
Hopper and Grosz - these two remarkable and still underrated modern
artists can be seen to combine in our contemporary defence both of the
dignity of the working family and of historic local cultures against
modernising technocracy, the immorality of social and economic elites
and the state-inspired philistinism that so often accompanies these
dangers.