At Last : A George Grosz Museum in Berlin

 

“The ducks had to go,” dealer and collector Juerg Judin told me, pointing at the small, now duck-free pond he had installed in the backyard of his old Berlin residence, a repurposed gas station from the 1950s. His former private home, which also became the habitat of a few exotic geese, ducks, and birds, has been recently handed over to a nonprofit association that will run an institution there over the next five years, the new Kleine Grosz Museum.
 
This privately funded venue, which opens to the public on Saturday, May 14, will be dedicated to the Berlin-born political artist George Grosz, a fixture of modern art history in Germany.
 
The name, which translates to the Little Grosz Museum, is a pun—Grosz sounds like the German word for big. It’s also a cheeky reference to the intimacy of the space, which is spread across two small levels of the revamped Shell station.
 
Despite the size, the modernist location has been expertly outfitted to provide museum-standard climate conditions. “That’s a must if we ever want to exhibit loans from institutional collections,” curator Pay Matthias Karstens said. (That’s also the reason why the exotic fauna had to be relocated.) Until the museum establishes a two-year backlog of climate control with which to approach institutions to obtain loans, the works on view will all stem from private collections—including Judin’s—and from the holdings of the Grosz estate.
 
Through painting and drawing, Grosz, who was active in the early 1900s until his death in 1959, captured the social realities of Berlin without euphemism. His caricature-like figuration has established him as one of the German capital’s most well-known artists from that last century; and yet, the Kleine Grosz Museum is the first institution dedicated to his oeuvre. This private initiative probably would not have happened if it weren’t for Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of the estate and the editor of Grosz’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné. The museum’s future beyond its initial five-year run will depend on its success in drawing in visitors and accruing financial support from additional funders.
 
Georg Before George; Gross Before Grosz

 
The museum’s ground floor houses a permanent collection that provides a chronological overview of the artist’s career, highlighting major periods of work during the Weimar years as well as his time in the U.S. It outlines a narrative that not only follows the sharp-eyed artist and draftsman’s sensibilities but also the horrors of the first half of the 20th century and the economic boom of the post-war years.
 
In 1928, Grosz created the stage set and costume design for Erwin Piscator’s staging of the dark comedic story Soldat Schwejk, and the watercolors he created as studies are a wonderful highlight of the exhibition in Berlin. Like much of the museum, it conjures a Berliner story: The German theater director’s famed Piscator-Bühne was just around the corner from where the museum is located, in the neighborhood of Schöneberg.
 
The upper level of the museum is dedicated to changing exhibitions; there will be two per year, ten in total for the museum’s already-secured duration. The first one, titled “Gross Before Grosz,” focuses on the artist’s very early years: already as a teenager, the young country boy named Georg Ehrenfried Gross exhibited a great talent as an illustrator. After the current show closes in September, the second exhibition set to open in November will explore Grosz’s 1922 travels to Soviet Russia where he met Lenin.
 
A selection of drawings from the current exhibition dating to 1904, when the artist was only 11 years old, are the first works visitors will encounter here. One drawing on a torn piece of paper features four anthropomorphized frogs. “You see very early on that someone is trying to master the technique, who has the ambition to become a real artist,” Karstens, the show curator, said. “Many of the motifs we see later are already present here.”
 
This early work is prominently signed G. Gross. Key to the artist’s ambition was to be recognizable, successful, and a brand—to do that, his birth name was simply too common in Germany at the time. In 1906, aged only 13, he already began experimenting with signing his creations under the name Grosz. It is only much later on during World War I that the artist became politicized and radicalized, developing anti-German sentiments that prompted him to change his first name as well to its anglicized version, George.
 
Grosz, the Great Observer
 
Alongside works created as a student in Dresden, the temporary exhibition also includes works from his early years in Berlin. Interestingly, these show a certain fear of the big city and its colorful characters. Human figures suddenly begin to appear in works such as Nächtlicher Überfall (translated: nighttime robbery) and Selbstmord (the German world for suicide), or a drawing of a derelict bar (all from 1912), which show scenes of violence and despair. “Moving in the city by day and night, he drew what he saw,” Jentsch said. “Grosz is not a caricaturist, he’s an observer.”
 
The artist’s canny observations, which Grosz is most well-known for, continue in the permanent exhibition on the ground level. Works in the chronological show include output from the 1950s, after Grosz and his family had moved back to Germany from the U.S. Never having reached the financial success he had hoped for on the other side of the Atlantic, a self-portrait shows the artist in his studio, bitter and defeated. The canvases around him are in disarray, and are punctured by a bean-shaped hollow that also features on the artist’s forehead. In his later years, George Grosz, one of the artists most closely associated with Berlin’s history, considered himself a failure.
 
Despite his tumultuous career, what he depicted ended up being occasionally prophetic. A watercolor from 1934, done when Grosz was already living in the U.S., called the Menace, shows Hitler as a murderous monster. “Created three years before Guernica,” Jentsch pointed out, “the work already anticipates what Hitler would soon become responsible for.”
 
A Former Gas Station in Berlin Has Been Revamped Into a Museum Dedicated to the Celebrated Weimar Artist George Grosz. By Hili Perlson. ArtNet News, May 11, 2022.

Filled with lustful murderers, dishevelled streetwalkers and hollow-eyed wartime amputees, George Grosz’s jagged sketches of Berlin street life during the Weimar Republic never sought to capture the German metropolis at its most beautiful.
 
Only fitting, then, that Berlin’s first museum dedicated solely to its master chronicler should not be in the gilded neoclassical halls of the German capital’s Museum Island but a seedier part of the city in which the satirist and Dada artist was born and died.
 
The Little Grosz Museum opens on Friday inside a former petrol station on the dusty Bülowstraße thoroughfare, overlooked by a noisy elevated metro track, and a stone’s throw from the German capital’s red-light strip around Nollendorfplatz.
 
It began as a privately funded initiative started seven years ago by Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of Grosz’s estate. It does not have its own collection but will present works loaned from other galleries over two compact gallery floors.
 
“George Grosz is an artist of worldwide renown, yet there is no museum on this globe that permanently shows more than two of his paintings,” Jentsch told the Guardian.
 
This is in part because his work was spread far and wide in the tumult of 1920s and 30s Germany, and in some cases destroyed. Subject to several court cases during the Weimar years – over defamation of the German army, blasphemy and “attacks on public morals” – about 300 of Grosz’s works were seized, then sold or burned as degenerate art by the Nazis after he emigrated to the US in 1933. “Plans for a Grosz museum were long hampered by that dispersal,” said Jentsch.
 
The small museum, which cannot hold more than 60 people at a time, serves up a reminder of the relevance of an uncompromising artist politicised by the horrors of war – while also correcting some of the myths about its hero along the way. In spite of his pacifist inclinations, Grosz volunteered to join the army in November 1914, in the hope of preempting conscription and avoiding being sent to the front.
 
One commonly told story, fed in part by the artist’s own vague descriptions of his wartime activity, is that the violence he witnessed in the first world war fired up the violent imagination of his later works and alienated him so radically from Germany that he decided to anglicise his name from Gross to Grosz to make a political statement.
 
The curators of “Please write Grosz instead of Gross”, the museum’s first exhibition, say that tells only half the story. After tracking down Grosz’s military medical records, they say it is likely the dadaist never experienced any frontline action first-hand. While his regiment fought trench warfare in Flanders in February 1915, Grosz was recovering at Berlin’s Charité hospital, having fallen ill with sinusitis on the way to the front. How closely to the front the artist was when he collected impressions that would result in a series of four sketches with titles such as Battlefield, is unclear.
 
When being redrafted into the reserve army two years later, Grosz had a mental breakdown, with officers finding him naked from the waist down on his first night. After the then 23-year-old tried to attack a medical officer with a knife, he was sent to a specialist hospital for patients with nervous system disorders where he spent the rest of the war.
 
“Grosz saw the flipside of wartime heroism, but mainly from within hospitals, in the company of those spat out by the front,” said Pay Karstens, the exhibition’s curator.

 
Digging through Grosz’s archive of early works, Karstens discovered that the artist’s change of surname took place years before the war, making a purely political motive unlikely. Born Georg Ehrenfried Gross, he signed his first work “Grosz” in 1906, aged 13, when an anti-nationalist sentiment was unlikely to have been held as a principled belief.
 
“Grosz wanted to become a successful illustrator for satirical magazines at the time, and he needed a brand name,” said Karstens. “Gross was too much of an everyday name for that.”
 
The anglicisation of his first name, by contrast, was a deliberately provocative act, at a time when other artists and poets celebrated their hatred of the wartime enemy, England.
 
“After witnessing this year of war, I am no longer such a strong friend of my fatherland,” he wrote to a friend in June 1916. Pictures such as 1917’s German Men, piled with grotesquely fat men in uniforms, show an artist thoroughly disgusted with his country of birth. From 1917, the letters he sent from his hospital bed were signed “George Grosz”.
 
Unlike his Dada jester-in-arms Helmut Herzfelde, who anglicised his name to John Heartfield around the same time, Grosz never sought to change his name officially by deed poll after the end of the war.
 
Instead he voted with his feet and left for New York, and later Huntington, shortly after the Nazi party emerged as the biggest political force in the 1932 elections. One of the planned exhibitions at the Little Grosz Museum will focus on the works he produced in the US, a country in which he felt enough at home to opt for naturalisation, but where his new work was often ignored in favour of his sketches of Weimar Berlin.
 
Other shows will focus on Grosz’s pioneering photo collages and his 1922 trip to the Soviet Union, which included an audience with Lenin.
 
With a total of 10 six-month temporary exhibitions planned, the museum’s lifespan is likely to be limited to five years. “If Berlin still wants to have a Grosz museum after that, it needs to cough up,” said Juerg Judin, the Swiss art collector who turned the converted Shell petrol station into his home 10 years ago and has temporarily offered it to the curators.
 
 
George Grosz: museum dedicated to city’s master chronicler opens in Berlin.  By Philip Oltermann. The Guardian. May 11, 2022. 

Tankstelle wird Grosz-Museum In der Berliner Bülowstraße kann man bald einen besonderen Kraftstoff tanken, nämlich Kunst. Eine Tankstelle wird dort zu einem Museum für Werke des Malers George Grosz.

Tankstelle wird Grosz-Museum.  Von Christhard Läpple. ZDF, May 5, 2022. 

1  He was a master of disguise
 
George Grosz was born Georg Gross in Berlin in 1893. No accepted explanation has been given as to why, in his twenties, he changed his name, other than that he loved the art of disguise. In public he often pretended to be a cowboy or a Dutch businessman, while in private he occasionally greeted first-time visitors to his home by saying he was Herr Grosz’s butler and apologising for his master’s absence. He also adopted a range of pseudonyms throughout his life: from Count Bessler-Orffyre and George Leboeuf to Dr William King Thomas.
 
2 No matter how many times Grosz left Berlin, something kept drawing him back
 
Grosz was born in Berlin but grew up in Stolp, a small town in Eastern Pomerania, not far from the Baltic. He returned to Berlin in 1910 to study at the School of Arts and Crafts, becoming a regular at the Café des Westens where the German Expressionists gathered. Arguably an even more important artistic influence on the young Grosz, however, was Futurism. The dynamic angularity of the jostling forms in his two breakthrough paintings, The Funeral: Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (1917-18) and Germany, A Winter's Tale (1918), shows a clear debt to the movement.

 
3  He joined the army twice during the First World War — and twice was discharged
 
War broke out while Grosz was still a student. He reluctantly signed up for the Deustches Heer in November 1914, only to be invalided out of the conflict with a sinus infection months later. Recalled to the front in 1917, he soon suffered a breakdown and was admitted to a field hospital, and then a military mental asylum, where doctors declared him unfit for service on grounds of insanity. The experience prompted a number of rapidly sketched drawings — featuring, in the artist's own words, ‘the beastly faces of comrades, arrogant officers and lecherous nurses’.

 
Gefährliche Straße  (above) captures Berlin’s descent into moral and physical chaos. It is one of a series of around 20 paintings — roughly half of which are now lost — that Grosz made of the city at night between spring 1917 and November 1918.
 
Peace would be signed with the Allies on 11 November 1918, two days after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as Emperor. In the wake of Germany’s defeat, Grosz said he ‘was disappointed not because the war had been lost, but because the people had suffered for so long without heeding the few voices raised against the mass slaughter’.
 
 
4  He became a key figure of the Dada movement
 
Starting in Zurich, before spreading to other European cities as war came to an end, Dada was rooted in disbelief that a conflict as absurdly long and devastating as World War I could have been fought in the name of progress. Dadaists concluded that the world had gone mad and that received values must be turned on their head.
 
In a defeated, demoralised Berlin, this included provocative stage performances — such as an obscene tap-dance routine with which Grosz made a name for himself. He also helped pioneer the technique of photomontage, which involved assembling fragments of photographs to create a synthetic new image — a reflection of the fractured Europe that was being unconvincingly pieced back together in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles.

 
5   Grosz was the pre-eminent chronicler of Berlin in the Twenties
 
Between the collapse of Germany's monarchy in 1918 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Berlin gained a reputation for being the bawdiest, most licentious city in Europe. Its cabaret acts were outrageously explicit, and its brothels were infamous. It is said that cocaine could be bought in the city's nightclubs for half the price of a decent dinner. ‘Barbarism prevailed... the times were mad,’ wrote Grosz in his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. His best-known works are visions of the seamy side of German metropolitan life at this time, which, along with Christopher Isherwood's ‘Berlin’ stories about Mr Norris and Sally Bowles, have indelibly shaped our picture of what the German capital was like in the Weimar years. They give off a heavy whiff of social decadence and political corruption. Take, for instance, Grosz’s 1922 watercolour Orgie, depicting a dingy bar in which a grotesque, cigar-chomping drunk spews wine through his teeth, while other patrons defecate and copulate around him.

 
6    He was sued on various occasions
 
In his drawing collections such as The Face of the Ruling Class and Ecce Homo — as well as in his work for journals and broadsheets — Grosz depicted greedy capitalists, smug bourgeoisie and nouveaux riches hags, among other social groups. Blessed with a razor-sharp wit, he was a social satirist who saw himself continuing in the tradition of William Hogarth.
 
As the German philosopher Hannah Arendt observed years later, however, Grosz's cartoons ‘seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage. We recognised these types, they were all around us’.
 
Pimps and prostitutes abound in Ecce Homo, a book that caused such a furore that Grosz felt compelled to apply for a pistol license on the grounds of self-defence. He was also taken to court on charges that 52 of the book’s 100 images were pornographic. Grosz was tried in February 1924 and was fined 6,000 marks. Numerous plates from the publication were confiscated and banned. This was the first of three separate occasions on which Grosz was successfully sued for producing offensive artwork.
 
These events may have led to his extended trip to France in 1924, and a further stay in Paris from June to October in 1925. The Dingo American Bar was opened in 1923 and quickly gained notoriety among English-speaking artists and writers, not least because it was one of the few drinking-houses that was open all night. Ernest Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald there in April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby and a few months before Grosz executed a study of the bar.

 
7     He briefly became a Communist
 
Grosz's work often expressed sympathy for poor, downtrodden workers suffering at the hands of rich, fat-cat bosses. ‘To show the oppressed the true face of their masters is the purpose of my work,’ he once said.
 
For a while, he was a member of the Communist Party, even receiving his membership card personally from Rosa Luxemburg (though over time, and after an underwhelming meeting with Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1922, his party loyalties waned).
 
Grosz felt that the fall of the Kaiser removed few of the inequalities that had long existed in German society. In 1930, he found an outlet for his frustrations by designing the costumes for Carl Sternheim’s adaptation of Flaubert’s political satire, The Candidate. Updated from 19th-century France to contemporary Berlin, it follows an ambitious candidate for the Reichstag who is courted by three different political party leaders — and who ultimately gives up his own wife to one of them to win the election.
 
8    His work was included in the Nazis' exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’
 
After a brief, enjoyable spell spent teaching in New York, Grosz returned to the US on what turned out to be a long-term basis in 1933, just a week before Hitler became German chancellor. (He would remain in America for more than two decades.) Grosz’s subject matter was highly objectionable to the Nazis: they labelled him ‘Cultural Bolshevist Number One’, destroyed many of the works he’d left behind and included another 15 in their Entartete Kunst exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in Munich in 1937.
 
By this point, however, Grosz was revelling in life across the Atlantic: as an artist he largely split his efforts between street scenes of Manhattan and windswept landscapes of Cape Cod. For the former, he roamed New York by day, sketchbook in hand, creating finished versions of his scenes by night — a typical result of this process being Quick Lunch, which shows customers of all socio-economic backgrounds crowding around a fast-food counter.
 
9   He became an American citizen
 
In 1938, having been stripped of his German citizenship, Grosz legally became an American. His style softened in these years, although there was still the occasional, apocalyptic painting of hell-fire on earth, which suggests the repression of freedoms back in his birth country were never far from his mind.
 
More than a hint of poignancy can be found in certain works on paper, too, such as the ink drawing titled Refugees, a self-portrait with his two sons. During the Second World War, his mother (who hadn't emigrated to the US with him) was killed in a bombing raid.
 
10   Grosz returned to Berlin six weeks before his death
 
By the 1950s, Grosz had started to drink heavily, and his wife Eva hoped that a change of surroundings — namely a return to post-Nazi Germany — would help him kick the habit. In May 1958 they moved into her parents’ old flat in West Berlin; but in July, after falling down a flight of stairs during a heavy night’s drinking, Grosz died. He was 65.
 
 
10 things to know about George Grosz. By Alastair Smart. Christie’s, January 9, 2020.

 

A new exhibition of work by the German artist George Grosz is staged, this autumn by Richard Nagy in London.  This major display will be the first in the UK since the Royal Academy’s retrospective almost 20 years ago. Some 50 works by the titan of German satirical art have been assembled from leading private and public collections around the world.

 
The works in this exhibition include savage caricatures and nightmarish visions that articulate Grosz’s sharp contempt for all aspects of bourgeois life in Germany. His childhood distrust of authority figures found its outlet after the catastrophic events of the First World War. Later in life he would describe his experiences in the trenches as ‘wholly negative’ and his caricatures of military generals in works such as Vor der Kaserne (In front of the Barracks) (1918) exude his hatred for the empty bluster of German militarism.
 
In the years following its humiliating defeat, Germany was cast into political disarray. Grosz established a reputation as a formidable satirist, producing bloodcurdling images such as Nieder mit Liebknecht (Down with Liebknecht) (1918) and encapsulating the cynical humour of Berlin’s Dada Movement with his wry illustrations for Die Pleite. Grosz became particularly fascinated by the decadent side of cosmopolitan
 
Berlin in the 1920s. In his art he fought against the base preoccupations of bourgeois society by uncovering a shadowy world of crime, murder and erotic license. Lustmord (Sexual Murder) is a prominent motif in his work, in which the combination of sexuality and violence is presented as a ritualization of the human quest for power, exemplified by political practice.
 
A highlight of the exhibition is an important work that was recently discovered in a private collection and has never been shown outside of Germany. The work is an earlier watercolour version of what Grosz claimed to be his greatest oil painting, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen (Germany, a Winter’s Tale) (1918), which was likely destroyed in the early 1930s. The title harks back to a classic of German literature, a satirical poem by Heinrich Heine, but the object of Grosz’s contempt is decidedly contemporary. In the centre of the image a well-fed bourgeois nationalist (Biedermann) sits at a dinner table with an upright knife and fork as though ready to start carving. In the chaos around him the viewer can distinguish brothels, factories and tenement buildings, while figures symbolising the pillars of society – the Church, the Military, and Education – turn a blind eye and loom in the foreground.
 
Several striking watercolours from Grosz’s famous series Ecce Homo (1923) are also on display. Dämmerung (The Gloaming) (1922) shows the day ending and nightlife awaking in the twilight of the big metropolis. A pimp with a cigar in his mouth watches over his harlots roaming the streets, while a neatly dressed businessman can be seen next to a prostitute who is wearing a striking red hat. A blind man at a house corner is selling matches. In the far distance one can detect a suspicious man walking towards the onlooker. A policeman, the so-called Schupo (Schutzpolizei), watches the scene from the corner of his eye, ready to intervene at his discretion.
 
At the root of Grosz’s political message is a moral imperative. As he wrote in 1921, ‘You can’t be indifferent about your position in this activity, about your attitude towards the problem of the masses… Are you on the side of the exploiters or on the side of the masses?’ For this reason, Richard Nagy is pleased to announce that the show will serve to benefit Global Witness, a charity dedicated to protecting communities and their environments from the abuses that result from natural resource- related conflict and corruption. Patrick Alley, Director of Global Witness comments: ‘We are delighted that Global Witness will share a platform with this fascinating and timely George Grosz exhibition. Being so savagely critical of corruption and injustice, his work resonates strongly with our campaigns to tackle the international systems, and political, financial and economic norms which exacerbate these problems.’
 
George Grosz (1893-1959) was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, though he spent most of his childhood in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. At the age of 15 he was dismissed from high school for striking one of his disciplinarian teachers. Fortunately Grosz had demonstrated artistic talent and he was encouraged to apply to the Dresden Academy of Art. In 1909, at the age of 16, he began a two-year course of study for his art diploma and was accepted into the Berlin Academy in 1911. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 delayed his ambitions to be an artist and illustrator, but he was eventually released from service on medical grounds. Back in Berlin, he published artwork in Franz Pfemfer’s leftist journal, Die Aktion, and soon became a prominent member of the anti-establishment Dada Movement.
 
Grosz’s artworks quickly attracted the notice of the authorities and in 1921 he was charged with defaming the German army. He would be charged twice more prior to his departure for the United States in the early thirties. During the Third Reich, hundreds of his paintings and drawings were confiscated and many destroyed. In the latter part of his career he tried to establish himself as a pure painter of landscapes and still life, but also continued to produce compositions of an apocalyptic and deeply pessimistic kind. He returned to Berlin in 1958, where he died a few months later.
 
 
George Grosz Exhibition Explores Berlin Prostitutes, Politicians And Profiteers Between The Wars. Artlyst, July 26, 2013.

George Grosz in Germany, on view at the New York Studio School Gallery, offers a rich overview of Grosz’s development as an artist and dissident. The works on paper, all from the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, featured in the show from 1913–1925 could be considered collectively like a piece of documentary, a primary source for visualizing life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is the portrait of a war victim coming to grips with the underlying horror of everyday reality.
 
Much of his early work, before 1920, fits well into more traditional forms of graphic art like newspaper illustrations, political cartoons, and one work that echoes the lines of Durer’s engravings. Grosz’s pen and ink drawings like “Das Ende,” Chaos,” and “Untitled (Man Walking His Dog),” are less typical for being unapologetically raw and impulsively drawn. They might be Grosz at his best and most disturbed, truly “degenerate.”
 
In the aftermath of World War I, Grosz’s loose, almost painterly approach is more soberly inflected. Grosz’s drawings from this period are described as caricature, in that they serve as a caustic remark upon the Weimar Republic, however, his message is not explicit, in fact, Grosz’s use of cartoon-like imagery and its perceived inferiority in the hierarchy of the arts only sublimates his askance glance at German society. In works like, “Bar Montmartre,” “Berlin Cafe,” and “Portraits,” Grosz offers a gadfly on the wall view of Bourgeois Berliners in situ: on the streets, in cafés, nightclubs, bars, and brothels. His slice of life portraits are immediately nerve wracking, asking the viewer to look for whatever it is that’s awry.
 
Grosz’s deranged yet graceful pen work might first appear as the aping of primitive or outsider art, but it is not merely an artistic affection. His cross-sectional surveying of a scene, marked by intersecting lines, suggests a sustained observation of a subject over time; despite looking like cartoons, they are not imaginary. Grosz’s fluid composition has added fluency in the era of the moving picture — his work unfolds across the paper. Harsh variance in line thickness, suggesting a depth-of-field, further emphasizes a cinematic perspective. In many works Grosz’s seemingly inexpert handling of facial features, the eyes and mouth in particular, gives each subject a distinct personality; however, his rendering of hands is most telling of all.

 
The gnarled hand featured in detail on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue hints at what lurks within each work. They recall the contorted appearance of barbed wire, the impact of mustard gas on the nervous system, or the jittering recoil of a machine gun: suggestions of World War I’s lingering trauma. While an entire generation of men was lost or physically wounded, a tell-tale sign of the war’s immediate impact, the psychological toll was more easily repressed. Shell shock, what we now know as PTSD, was disregarded by prominent doctors at the time because it was viewed as a sign of weak will and no conclusive test could prevent anyone from claiming it. However, in extreme cases, PTSD did produce a physiological response, caught on film for the first time and shown in news reels — psychological trauma made indisputable.
 
While Grosz’s military service was brief — he was discharged after a month of service — it had a profound influence on his work. The catalogue text for the recent Dada exhibition at Museum of Modern Art mentions that Grosz “may have suffered shell shock.” After some internet sleuthing, I found that he did, in fact, suffer from shell shock towards the end of the war in 1917.
 
Grosz’s own words describing the mental turmoil he suffered on the battlefield:
 
““My nerves broke down, this time before I could even get near the front and see rotting corpses and barbed wire … Nerves, down to the tiniest fiber, nausea, revolt — pathological, maybe —anyway, a total breakdown, even in the face of omnipotent regulations”
 
 
As Grosz’s experience suggests, shell shock is much more than a temporary condition caused by exposure to shock waves from bomb blasts. Shell shock, or PTSD, is a lasting impression left by any sort of exposure to the grotesqueries of war. PTSD is a suitable condition to ascribe to Germany itself post-WWI, made all the more relevant by the fact that Hitler’s experience with the disorder is suggested to have led to his radicalization. Unfortunately for the world, Hitler did not recover through cathartic mark-making like Grosz.

Caricature serves as perfect metaphor for a mind off-kilter, Grosz reduces Weimar society to a few discernible lines, and each stroke provides him a platform for airing his grievances. His restraint is at once raw and elegant, a calculated vacillation between astute draftsmanship and unrestrained gesture, offering a level of psychological insight we risk losing with increasing dependence on computer intervention between the artist and object. Grosz’s pen and ink on paper drawings provide indelible intimacy with a mind maimed by war.
 
George Grosz in Germany, curated by Karen Wilkin, is on view at the New York Studio School Gallery (8 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) until January 4.
 
The Shock and Awe of George Grosz. By  Robert Cicetti. Hyperallergic, December 12, 2013.

  

The heirs of German artist George Grosz are demanding the return of works that were stolen during the Nazi era and now hang in museums. They want to exhibit the works in a Grosz museum, but their legal status is murky.

 A rear apartment building in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood; a studio on the top floor; a journey to the past: Art historian Ralph Jentsch holds photos that are more than 90 years old. "Unbelievable," he says. The radiator is still the same, and so is the door. "This is the way it looked when George Grosz painted in this room."

 It was in this studio where Grosz, the great expressionist, Dadaist and social critic, created the art that made him world-famous -- paintings and drawings of fat speculators, cynical military officials and extravagant prostitutes, of the maimed victims of war and the emaciated poor. Until 1932, Grosz painted in the studio, with its five-meter (16-foot) ceilings, where an artist from Moscow paints today.

 When stormtroopers broke down the door of Grosz's live-in studio on Jan. 31, 1933, the day after the Nazis came to power, the artist and his family were already in New York. "I very much doubt I would have made it out of there alive," he later wrote.

 Grosz had consigned most of his paintings and drawings to his art dealer. But the dealer, who was Jewish, also had to flee the Nazis and took only some of the works out of the country. In connection with their campaign against so-called "degenerate art," the Nazis confiscated 285 of Grosz's works in museums, some of which they sold. (Most were burned.) About 70 paintings vanished without a trace. Ralph Jentsch, visibly moved as he looks around in Grosz's former studio, is the managing director of the painter's estate. He wants to "make up for the injustice" that the Nazis inflicted on the artist. He says: "They plunged him into misery."

 When Grosz learned that the Nazis had burned a large share of his life's work, his wife Eva wrote after the war, "there was a complete collapse," and he began to suffer from "anxiety, particularly nightmares" and "to drink without moderation." In July 1959, shortly after his return to Berlin, Grosz was found in a stairwell one morning, unconscious from a drinking binge. He died a short time later.

 Of course, it's impossible to make up for Grosz's tragedy half a century later. Jentsch knows this. He has spent 20 years assembling a catalog of Grosz's works, a compilation of about 14,000 photos and seemingly endless lists. "At least the stolen pictures should be returned to his family," says Jentsch.

 Grosz was a prolific artist. He created about 450 paintings and more than 15,000 works on paper. Pictures from his Berlin days are worth millions today, and Jentsch has traced some of them to prestigious museums in New York, Vienna, Tokyo and Bremen. But their directors are opposed to returning the works to Grosz's heirs. They see themselves as the rightful owners.

 This claim, however, is at least up for debate. Since the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, there has been international agreement that works of art stolen or "confiscated as a result of persecution" during the Nazi years should be returned to their former owners. In the Grosz case, this would be his son Marty, 78, who lives in Philadelphia, and his sister-in-law Lillian, in Princeton, New Jersey. The Grosz heirs agree that they do not want to place restituted works on the market. Instead, they hope to exhibit the paintings and drawings confiscated in the Nazi era at a George Grosz museum, and they are considering Berlin as a possible location.

 Grosz has undoubtedly earned a museum of his own -- particularly since not a single art collection in the world contains more than two of the Berlin native's works. This is ironic, because Georg Ehrenfried Groß, as his name appears on his birth certificate, was one of the most prominent German representatives of modernism. His first solo exhibit, in Munich in April 1920, provoked angry criticism. The Bayerischer Kurier newspaper warned against the "witch's cauldron from which this mad, caterwauling brew emerges, in rutting ecstasies of wild, unbridled instincts." It didn't take long before the public prosecutor's office began charging Grosz, a Dadaist and radical provocateur, with insulting the Army of the Reich, disseminating obscene writings and blasphemy.

 

Not Jewish, but Persecuted

 In 1926, Grosz signed a contract with gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, the most influential art dealer in the Weimar Republic, who also represented Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Ernst Barlach. Their business relationship ended when the art market collapsed during the Great Depression, and Flechtheim cancelled the contract in 1931. It was a heavy blow to Grosz. Though museums were buying his paintings, he was chronically broke and depended on Flechtheim's advances. The situation was "grim, at least as far as the (German) mark is concerned," Grosz concluded. "My source of income is gone."

 His socially critical art made Grosz, a leftist and pacific, a hated figure of the right. An officer shot at him in a restaurant, but hit a waiter instead. He received anonymous threats on a regular basis, and he once found an iron pipe in his studio with the following note attached: "This is what you'll get, you old Jewish pig, if you continue what you're doing."

 Unlike Grosz, Flechtheim, the art dealer, was Jewish. So he was also at risk when the Nazis came into power, and when he fled to Paris in 1933, Flechtheim left at least 70 paintings by Grosz and many more watercolors and drawings in Berlin. Before an insolvency administrator could take over the company, Flechtheim managed to move about half of the Grosz works to Paris, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell them.

 In a secret "Census of Leading Men of the System Era" compiled by the SS, Grosz was described as "one of the most despicable representatives of degenerate art, who works in an anti-German fashion." The document notes that he was "deprived of citizenship on March 8, 1933." Meanwhile, a despondent Grosz was in New York and didn't know what had happened to the paintings and drawings that had remained in Berlin. The loss made him "sad and angry," says his son Marty.

 In late 1952, however, Grosz discovered his painting titled "The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which the MoMA was proudly presenting as a new acquisition. Grosz wrote to his brother-in-law in Berlin: "The Modern Museum exhibited a painting stolen from me (am powerless to do anything about it). They bought it from someone who stole it."

 When estate administrator Jentsch and the family's attorney recently negotiated with the MoMA over a possible return of the painting, its attorney coolly noted that the museum considered itself the painting's rightful owner.

 David Rowland, a lawyer who specializes in restitution, successfully negotiated the controversial return of the painting "Berlin Street Scene," by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of Grosz's contemporaries. Rowland has proposed declaring the Grosz painting shared property of the heirs and the museum for three years. If the MoMA could not substantiate its property rights within this period, he argued, the painting should go to the heirs. The museum has recently rejected the proposal.

 Through painstaking detective work, though, Jentsch managed to trace much of the portrait's adventurous path to New York. After Grosz emigrated it was still at the Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin. In 1937, an art historian named Charlotte Weidler said she had inherited it from Flechtheim. But before he died in exile in London in March 1937, Flechtheim had designated his nephew as his sole heir.

 Weidler immigrated to the United States. In 1952 she sold the "Portrait of Max Herrmann-Neisse" to the MoMA through an agent. The museum paid $850 for the work. Today, that's dirt cheap. But before World War II, other Grosz works were unloaded for a fraction of this amount. In 1936 Flechtheim consigned more than two dozen works to Carel van Lier, an Amsterdam art dealer. After Flechtheim's death, van Lier contacted neither his wife in Berlin nor Georg Grosz in the United States, but held an auction instead.

 The auction was rigged in advance, and 24 paintings sold for an average of 15 reichmarks apiece -- about €150 ($203) today. Van Lier bought five of the most important paintings himself and re-sold them later for a substantial profit.

 The Kunsthalle Museum in Bremen has two of Grosz's works today: the painting "Pompe funèbre," one of the works sold off in the rigged Amsterdam auction, and "Still Life with Okarina," which was seized in Berlin.

 Six years ago, Jentsch wrote to Wulf Herzogenrath, the director of Kunsthalle Museum. Herzogenrath still argues today that the paintings were bought at auction in Amsterdam "during peacetime." "Besides," he continues, "they no longer belonged to Grosz, but to Flechtheim."

 Strong Resistance

 Other Grosz paintings were dispatched around the world from Amsterdam along similarly serpentine and legally contested paths. "Promenade" is on display at the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo, and Vienna's Museum of Modern Art insists that it is the rightful owner of the painting "Keepsake -- The Alliance."

 Private collectors have proved to be more understanding than, for example, the restitution advisory panel of the Austrian Ministry of Culture. An American brought the painting "Ideas of the Time," which had been hawked in Amsterdam, to the Sotheby's auction house in New York. After Jentsch told the owner of the painting about its history, he returned it for a finder's fee. A similar arrangement is being negotiated with a German-American family that owns the painting "Still Life with Pipe and Okarina."

 But Marty Grosz continues to meet strong resistance at museums. "In theory, the Washington declaration on the return of art stolen in the Nazi era is very good," says the painter's son, but in practice, he adds, things are "pretty unfair." And the heirs lack the necessary funds to sue the museums for the return of Grosz's works.

 Marty Grosz is becoming increasingly skeptical over whether his dream of a Georg Grosz museum will ever become reality. "Suing would take forever," he says. "By the time the courts decide, I'll be long dead."

 

Re-Collecting George Grosz's Art. By Michael Sontheimer. Der Spiegel, March 26, 2009.

 

 

 

Further info here

Bruce Nauman : The Artist's Artist

Raffaele: How did you start doing films?

Nauman: Films are about seeing. I wanted to find out what I would look at in a strange situation, and I decided that with a film and camera I could do that. In one film I did, the title was straight and everything else tipped on its side, partly because you could get more in the picture and partly as a concession to art—so it looked as if I did something to it, changed it. The films I did with Bill Allan are the closest to just making a film, without considering art. We made a film called 'Fishing for Asian Carp.'  Bill Allan got into his boots and went into the creek. We ran the film until Allan caught the fish.

Raffaele: Was it a put-on?

Nauman: No, it’s that you want to make a film, you don’t know how long it’ll take, and so you pick something to make it about that will determine how long it will be. When he caught the fish, it ended.

Raffaele: What is it that films give you that other work doesn’t?

Nauman: I guess the film becomes a record of what went on. Maybe also because you tend to believe that what is shown on a film is really true—you believe a film, or a photograph, more than a painting.

Raffaele: What is this piece called?

Nauman: 'A Wax Mold of the Knees of Five Famous Artists.' Although it’s made out of fiberglass, and they are my knees. I couldn’t decide who to get for the artists, so I used my own knees. Making the impressions of the knees in a wax block was a way of having a large rectangular solid with marks in it. I didn’t want just to make marks in it, so I had to follow another kind of reasoning. It also had to do with trying to make the thing itself less important to look at. That is, you had to know what it is about, too. To go and look at it was to try and think whether you liked to look at it, or just how involved you were in looking at art in general; that was not quite enough though, you had to know these other things, too.

Raffaele: One has to approach your work in terms of itself, because it seems completely unlike anything else. What do you relate yourself to in past art?

Nauman: A little bit of everything. I suppose my work must have to do with some of the things the Dadaists and Surrealists did. I like to give the pieces elaborate titles like they did, although I’ve only been titling them recently.

 Raffaele: How important is the making of the thing, as opposed to your conceiving of it? In this knee piece, is the actual doing of it—the molds and the fiberglass and the pour, etc.—the important thing, or is it the final image?

Nauman: A little of each—although it is should be O.K. if someone else made it. The problem is, you can’t get someone else to make it right. I’ve had that problem. I think I make the plans as well as they can be made, and then I bring them to somebody and they make the piece wrong, or they think they can make it stronger and do it another way.

Raffaele: What determines what medium you’ll use for a particular piece?

Nauman: The reason for making a piece is what it will look like. For instance, at one point I thought about making outdoor sculpture. I thought that outdoor sculpture was usually big, and durable, but that seemed very dumb, because it’s already nice outside with trees and fields, and I didn’t want to put something there and change it all. So I thought maybe I’d make something which fell apart after a while—which would return to nature. Like dirt, or paper, that would disintegrate. Then I made this piece which is a plaque which you put on a tree. After a few years, the tree would grow over it, and finally cover it up, and it would be gone.

Raffaele: That’s beautiful.

Nauman: Then I made plastic copies and I thought maybe I could send them to people I knew all over the world.

Raffaele: It reads, “A rose has no teeth.” What does that mean?

Nauman: I got it from Wittgenstein. He’s talking about language, and he says to think about the difference between “A rose has no teeth” and “A baby has no teeth.” With the first one, you don’t know what it means, because you’ve made an assumption outside the sentence. So when I thought of what to put on this plaque I thought of these words, because they have as much to do with nature as anything I could think of.

Raffaele: Do you think of what you do as art?

Nauman: It’s important that someone should see the work.

Raffaele: Yet the tree plaque is not about someone seeing it, it just exists somewhere.

Nauman: It could be in a gallery.

Raffaele: Then somehow it would be a plan or a scheme—like a new ship at the dock being inspected before its maiden voyage. I mean, the liner is for sailing and not inspecting.

Nauman: I’m not sure how I feel about doing these pieces and then not having anyone ever hear about them. It is really funny about my wanting to make things for people to see, and at the same time making them as hard as possible for people to see. I like to take the reference or contact points away, and those things which people are used to looking at—but that isn’t true either.

Raffaele: I see you’re making a neon sign with words on it. What does it say?

Nauman: “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”

Raffaele: And do you believe that?

Nauman: I don’t know; I think we should leave that open.

From the Archives: Bruce Nauman on Fishing, Surrealism, and Filmmaking, in 1967. By Alex Greenberger. ArtNews  March 16, 2018.  

In 1966, Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker traveled to San Francisco, where they interviewed four emerging artists who mainly created sculptures—very weird sculptures, that is, that often resembled biological objects. One of the artists they spoke to was Bruce Nauman, who, at the time, had begun creating drily funny films, sculptures, and performances that eluded even the smartest of critics.  Excerpted from “The Way-Out West: Interviews with 4 San Francisco Artists”

By Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker. Summer 1967

Though  the artist Bruce Nauman’s home and studio are just outside of Santa Fe, N.M. — a few miles from grapefruit margaritas, enchiladas with red-and-green chile sauce (“Christmas style”), stores selling miniature adobe huts, innumerable yoga studios, innumerable galleries of local artists — the distance feels greater. To enter into Nauman’s world is to leave much of what one feels to be familiar, to suddenly feel all of it is trivial and inessential and to regret that at some point one has to return to it. His house is so unassuming as to be indescribable, his studio not much more than a giant shed. There is a field for a few tranquil horses, a shelter full of bales of hay. It was a dry year, he said in his clipped, hoarse, somewhat unlocatable Western accent, and water-stressed rattlesnakes stayed close to home. Just the other day, he found one on the steps to the studio.

Nauman has lived in New Mexico since 1979, and on a visit this past spring, I often thought he would have been content to speak only about rattlesnakes and horses. For a time, Nauman had a business breaking in and selling horses; though he no longer rides much, the evidence of his obsession is everywhere. At the corner of the sink in his studio bathroom, there is a neatly piled, several-inches thick stack of Eclectic Horseman magazine. In the several hours I spent with him, his most enthusiastic utterance came when he was pointing to images of foals on his walls. “When those babies are born — phew,” he exhaled in delight, “it’s so great.” He told a funny story about the painter Agnes Martin, who had lived not far away, and with whom he used to go to the racetrack to bet on horses. She would carefully observe the horses warming up beforehand, and then choose one to bet on — a method that seemed to reliably win. “She knew how to pick ’em,” Nauman told me. Whether talking about horses or not, he spoke with slowness, deliberation and care. It took me some time to slip into the rhythms of his speech, themselves reflections of an unhurried mind, in which there was time to weigh each word for the right meaning.

Nauman is tall and physically imposing, but the destabilizing effect of meeting one of the most influential American artists was mitigated by his short-sleeved-Hawaiian-shirt-and-dad-jeans mien. He is also — simply and unembarrassedly — aging, his body no longer capable of its previous feats. In his early videos from the 1960s, he displayed his lithe figure and startlingly handsome face to tremendous effect. A 16-millimeter masterwork from 1968, “Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square,” shows the artist in a white T-shirt and dark pants toeing the line of a square in an empty studio, stopping to strike an exaggerated Renaissance-style contrapposto.

Now 76 years old, Nauman’s hair has thinned and his abdomen has filled out, and his recent work accentuates these facts to the same degree that his older works highlighted his balletic grace within arbitrarily delineated confines. He recently survived bowel cancer — “Now I have a bag,” he said, patting where it was on his stomach — and in recent video works such as “Contrapposto Studies, i through vii” (2015-16), he walks gingerly, his body split across multiple screens. Nauman was preparing for a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, his third major career survey, which opens on Oct. 21, a collaboration between MoMA, MoMA PS1 in Queens and the Schaulager museum near Basel, Switzerland. He showed me images of his latest work in progress, a 3-D portrait of his walking a line like someone pulled over for a potential D.W.I. who is forced to demonstrate their sobriety. It came to him when, following chemotherapy treatments, he found that he had lost feeling in his feet and legs, which his doctors feared might be the result of nerve damage. In physical therapy, one of the things his therapist had him do was walk a line. “And at first, I could hardly even stand up,” he said, “and he had to hold me to be able to walk. And if I would fall on the floor, I couldn’t get up; I had to get a chair and pull myself up.” Eventually, he managed to do it. Nauman had planned to recreate six videos from the 1960s. He was only able to do one, and only in a strained manner.

It is conventional to think of Nauman as having no particular style, no unifying idea that is uniquely his. Instead, he seems to have fascinations, or obsessions: stretches of working through the same basic set of materials or ideas over the course of several years. And yet, Nauman does circle around a fundamental problem: the experience, in one’s environment, architecture, language or body, of being controlled. He subjects himself, his artistic collaborators and his viewers to disturbing experiments in surveillance; he makes us participants in art that is hectoring, aggressive, buttonholing and violent, and fills us with a sense of complicity. That he does so in virtually every medium only makes the sensation more overwhelming — when trapped in the mind of Bruce Nauman, there is no escape.

An emblematic piece is Nauman’s lithograph from 1973 that simply asks us, in reverse lettering, to “Pay Attention,” and follows that address with an obscenity. It induces helplessness: As soon as we’ve deciphered the image, we’ve done precisely what Nauman asked us to do. The letters themselves push against their lines, against each other, hemmed in — crushed by the frame of the picture. Another video installation from 1988, a parody of lab experiments that hints at the unknowability of human behavior, features a rat in a maze and a teenage boy playing the drums and is titled “Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer).” Early in his career, Nauman claimed the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the early 20th-century philosopher who probed the “limits of language.” He’s not read Wittgenstein in some time, but he still returns to the works of the novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett. This is unsurprising when one thinks of Beckett’s trapped protagonists: Winnie from “Happy Days” (1961), buried in sand from the waist down; the streaming monologue of “The Unnamable” (1953), narrated by a limbless, trunkless head in a jar. Meaning is often elusive in contemporary art. Nauman constructs scenarios that coerce meaningfulness from our participation in them. We can’t help but at least attempt to understand what he’s trying to tell us. Though Nauman may not have intended it, an examination of his art over the last 40 years says as much about where we have ended up as a society as it does about Nauman.

Appended to Naman’s  studio is a small office, where his longtime, spiky-haired studio manager, Juliet Myers, works, along with Michele Menotti, the assistant to the painter Susan Rothenberg, who is married to Nauman and has her own studio on the compound. (Rothenberg was working the day I visited, occasionally taking a break to watch Serena Williams’s return to the French Open.) I’d expected Nauman’s studio to be overwhelming, crammed with clown costumes and lewd half-finished neon sculptures. Instead, it looked like a messy desk extended over the length of a cavernous warehouse. Nauman told me that he lets things pile up until he decides he needs the space; then he clears up one of the dust-covered piles and gets to work.

Walking through his studio, then, is only partially a revealing guide to the various offhand predilections that have preoccupied Nauman through his career. On one table were coils of electrical wire, copies of Livestock Weekly and Western Horseman, Amazon Prime boxes. There were more Amazon boxes piled in a corner, under photos of horses posted haphazardly along the wall, along with several horse wall calendars. There were saddles, an armchair with the stuffing busting out. There was cat food, a cat litter box and a cat that came in and mewled reliably throughout the day. There were paint cans, rolled-up pink insulation and indeed some oversize clown shoes. In one corner, there was a running projection from “Walks In Walks Out” (2015) in which Nauman walks in front of a projection of “Contrapposto Studies, i through vii”; Nauman told me that his two cats liked to watch it. From the ceiling were hung, to form an upside-down triangle, life-size polyurethane sculptures of caribou and foxes; this was a model for a work called “Leaping Foxes” (2018). One section of the space, somewhat imperceptibly laid out, was set up for the latest video he was working on, with the videographer Bruce Hamilton, in which Nauman would walk in a straight line in the studio. Much of what Nauman explores in his work is hidden or invisible. This is apparently a habit with him, given how much of his work involves his own body. He told the story of when, in the 1960s, the director at the Berkeley Art Museum came to visit his studio in San Francisco, where Nauman lived until 1968, working out of a small storefront in an abandoned grocery store. He’d been working on “Collection of Various Flexible Materials Separated by Layers of Grease With Holes the Size of My Waist and Wrists” (1966), a flat rectangle of foil, plastic sheet, foam rubber, felt and grease, with holes that did not, in fact, conform to Nauman’s body. “Where’s the work? What am I supposed to be looking at?” the director asked.

The breakthrough that Nauman engineered — of falling back on himself, alone in the studio, trying to figure out, as if from a position of supreme naïveté, in whatever medium possible, what it is to make art — is now so normal, his influence so widespread, that it is difficult to appraise his achievement sufficiently. One would have to look to Andy Warhol to find a figure who cast such a long shadow over the cultural landscape. Nauman’s career has done nothing less than create an entirely new language for visual art, a legacy that can be seen everywhere from the aphoristic installations of Glenn Ligon and Jenny Holzer, to the monumental assemblages of Jeff Koons and Richard Serra, to the conceptual mischief of Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler.

Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1941, though his father’s job as an engineer and salesman for General Electric kept the family moving around the Midwest. He became used to isolation, he told me — used to moving to a place and learning to watch and observe. After high school, Nauman went to the University of Wisconsin to study math and music but changed his major to art, graduating with a B.F.A. Later, at the University of California, Davis, he earned his M.F.A. When he began to exhibit work in the mid-1960s, Minimalism was ascending to a hegemonic position over the rest of American art. Figures like Barnett Newman and Donald Judd had tamed and solidified the artwork, and the figure of the artist became solemn to the point of absurdity. The highly finished sculpted object became the locus of attention and of artistic meaning. Nauman recalled how shoddy some Minimalist objects actually looked. “I was surprised at how badly made they were,” he said, speaking of Judd’s early work. Elsewhere he has spoken of how he wanted to make a “less important thing to look at,” as a riposte to the obtrusive self-seriousness of Minimalism. In 1967, for his first solo New York show, he exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Among the standout works was a series of neon rungs titled “Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals” (1966).

Burrowing into the depths of himself, he created art that consisted of others watching him learn what art was. Given an empty studio in Southampton, N.Y., by the artists Roy Lichtenstein and Paul Waldman, Nauman made a series of defining videos in which he tested the space of the studio with his body. (Nauman makes broad sweeping gestures when he speaks; in trying to describe a room, he will sculpt out of the air with his hands.) In “Walk With Contrapposto” (1968), he slithers down a narrow corridor, striking the contrapposto pose of ancient Greek sculpture, arms bent, hands resting on jutted hips. What was for the Greeks a way of reconciling dynamism and rest was exposed in Nauman’s work as something purely artificial, an artistic norm that ran against the natural inclinations of the human body. At the same time, it was terrifically precise: Try walking and striking the same pose as Nauman did, which he invited people to do when he put the corridor into one of his exhibitions, and you’ll feel the effort and planning and grace it took to execute it as he did.

His other great discovery of this period was neon. Nauman had always been attracted to sculpture — painting is perhaps the only medium he avoids — but with neon he found a form that brought with it the synesthesia of sound that fused with light and color: the buzzing and droning of the tubes, along with the occasional pop or crackle. (Nauman admired the sustained drones of the American avant-garde composer La Monte Young, and for a time, he played bass and violin in a drone band in the 1960s.) In his early attempts with the form, he tried blocking the light: painting the tubes black or immersing them in a crate of motor oil. Having worked out of the old storefront in San Francisco, with a neon sign out front, he came to recognize the potential to make signs of his own. He brought to neon his deadpan facility with word games, imbued with his own special sense of sadism and desire to provoke discomfort. In “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)” (1967), the titular message is spelled out in looping cursive in a spiral, moving from the inside out. It secures assent less aggressively, but just as manipulatively, as “Pay Attention” does. Giving viewers an old cliché about what it is artists do, it calls attention to its own Hallmark-card falseness, highlighted by its goofy, peach coloration. The later “One Hundred Live and Die” (1984) is a series of alternately depressing, uplifting and scary variations on the formulas “X and live” and “X and die.” “Suck and die” one says; “Rise and live,” says another; “Piss and live” another. In an exhibition of his work from the mid-1980s, he revealed a series of sex acts in neon, in which figures would turn on and off as they fellated each other.

In the span of two decades, Nauman came to embody a larger transition in the art world, and perhaps beyond the art world. He had created seminal works on video in the studio of Lichtenstein, a Pop artist, which pointed in a direction away from Minimalism and toward some combination of process, dance and performance. And there was the suggestion, in his self-aware language-based works, of what would come to be called postmodernism. The artist did not reveal mystic truths — he simply revealed what it was to make art. Nauman played a critical part in laying out the possible pathways that art could follow. Then, in 1979, he disappeared.

Reflecting on his  move to the desert in New Mexico, Nauman admitted to having been nervous. “I’m not sure how you develop as an artist outside of a major cultural center,” he said, suggesting that you needed that “exposure and intensity around you at least some time in your life.” But he felt he had developed the habits and ideas that would carry him in relative isolation — and that he had been on the hunt for that sort of privacy for some time. He had left the Bay Area because of what he felt was, as he once put it, an “incredible paranoia among most of the people I knew” that reflected a distrust of intellectualism and measures of artistic success, as well as a generalized hatred of New York and Los Angeles, the country’s main art centers. “In New York there’s a season for art and in California it just doesn’t happen that way,” he told Interview magazine in 1973. “Since there is so little gallery business going on, and the weather doesn’t change that much, it doesn’t have that cycle quality.” Nauman has never lived in New York, traveling to the city only occasionally during the one winter in 1968 that he occupied Lichtenstein’s Southampton studio, and he lived only on the fringes of Los Angeles when he moved to Pasadena in the spring of 1969. In moving to New Mexico, he also missed, perhaps providentially, the ballooning of the commercial art world. By the late 1970s, Larry Gagosian had opened his first gallery and Julian Schnabel had sold out his first show of “broken plate” paintings: two events that signaled the crudeness, volatility and sheer commercial swagger that would overtake the art world in the years to come. Nauman’s work from this time stood apart from that world, even as he became recognized for his influence and enduring vision. Pursuing his own path, far from everyone else, he became at once emblematic and singular.

There was always something darkly funny about Nauman’s work — the neon signs that look inviting enough to hang over a mom-and-pop store, if only they didn’t depict an unmentionable sexual position — but his humor, like Beckett’s, was filled with abyssal dread. As he moved further and further away from the trappings of the art world and its society, Nauman’s work shifted. His daughter (from his marriage to his first wife, with whom he also has a son) went to school in the area, and he got to know cowboys: people who, like artists, did a number of different things, in addition to breaking and riding horses. In other words: Art was just another way of life, and consisted of so many different kinds of activity, in a way that both inflated and deflated its importance. Rather than ignore this conflict, Nauman explored it, and his work subsequently, perhaps inevitably, became darker, more combative. In 1994, his second major retrospective traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where the philosopher Arthur Danto, the art critic for The Nation, reviewed it, professing to be utterly confused by the “noisy, awful exhibition,” which he thought was apparently the work of a “smartass perpetrator of aesthetic practical jokes” rather than the “humanist” that Danto had previously “believed him to be.” It was, he said, “aggressive and nasty, cacophonous and arrogant, silly and portentous.” One of the works that Danto and a number of other critics (and no doubt many viewers) struggled with was “Clown Torture” (1987), Nauman’s most terrifying video, previously shown at the 1989 Whitney Biennial. An installation of four monitors and two screen projections, it showed a figure in a clown costume — in a departure, it was the actor Walter Stevens, not Nauman himself — engaged in acts of self-abasement or abject protest. In one, the clown was watched from above, on the toilet; in another, he kicked at the screen with his outsize shoes, screaming, “No, no, no, no, no!” In another, he told an endless joke: “Pete and Repeat are sitting on a fence. Pete falls off. Who’s left? Repeat ...” Here again was the old absurdity, but multiplied — the overall effect a sense of horror, and complicity in the misery of this strange, faceless, unknown and unknowable figure.

Whether it was the nightmarishness of the show or simply the cumulative weight of all the years of work, the retrospective sapped Nauman, and he had difficulty returning to work. He told me that retrospectives were “no fun.” “Sometimes I can’t make any connection with why I did something or how,” he said, when talking about the work that will be shown in the MoMA retrospective this month. Still, he was pleased that so far “there was nothing that I hated.” Revisiting another work from this period included in the show, the video installation “Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime” (1990), in which a voice-over offers degrading instructions to a meek mime, he said, “I hadn’t seen that for years, and it was pretty scary. I didn’t remember it as being scary, but it was.” At the same time, the long silence following the 1990s retrospective signaled another breakthrough. There were signs of it even earlier, like in “Clown Torture”: the fact that he had given up some modicum of control, allowing another person to do the work that he might have done. “One thing that was very hard for me was by allowing people to participate in the work in a very active way,” he said, “I was giving up a lot of control. So that was kind of scary and important.”

That Nauman can find himself letting go in his old age seems like a sharp departure from his previous work. Even if he has returned to focus on his body, what is apparent in his later work is the way his body no longer functions as it once did; age, something that no one can truly fight off, has taken its toll. But there was always an aspect of freedom-seeking in what he did, in setting himself within certain confines and trying to find out what, precisely, he was capable of. He seemed to be looking for a medium, a way of working that would fit with a feeling of being overtaken, of losing control. His more recent work, as with his earlier output, goes deep into the private self, somehow bringing you closer to the world, to the society that you otherwise could not see. As it happens, it isn’t just his body that is giving way — the desert he sought out nearly 40 years ago has begun to change as well. The red, dusty landscape that surrounds his house and studio is rived by a dry creek bed. When Nauman first arrived to this property in 1989, the creek was reliably full. “Now it’s dry,” he said, “except when there are big storms.” But there are fewer big storms, and the water level has dropped seven feet.

Nauman’s work is often a test of how much we can endure: whether we can stomach the horror of an abject clown, a maze of thoughtless rats, a mime performing humiliating instructions, an aggressive injunction to “Pay Attention.” In its exploration of control, discipline and torture, and a linguistic world riddled with pat phrases and evacuated of all meaning, the experience his work induces can be awful, nauseating, horrifying. In moments of sublime social disorientation — we are living in one such moment now — Nauman appears as one of the few artists who tells it exactly as it is, without ever being didactic or eschewing the personal motivations that are the ultimate source of art. “I never saw being an artist as something that’s pure and separate from how you live the rest of your life, the politics of the situation,” he told me. When I asked him whether he was explicitly pursuing political themes, like surveillance, in works such as 1970’s “Green Light Corridor” — a claustrophobic passageway, lit with green neon, in which a camera films the viewers’ attempts to squeeze through (the very same passageway on which Nauman had once struck contrapposto poses) — he was uncertain. “I understood what was going on,” he said. “But it was also more of an investigation of my own feelings about privacy.”

Despite its well-deserved reputation for unpleasantness, Nauman’s work is protean and wide-ranging enough to be, at times, observant, watchful and open. In 2002, he debuted the monumental film “Mapping the Studio 1 (Fat Chance John Cage),” his most thoroughgoing attempt to cede control. In the spirit of the composer named in the title, as well as the unnamed Warhol (whose films, like the eight-hour “Empire,” from 1964, were also inspired by Cage), Nauman created an experiment where he recorded his studio at night, allowing the video to capture both its emptiness and any casual nighttime activities of the animals (cats and mice, principally) that roamed into the frame. The monotony of the piece of course hearkened back to the droning, durational art that he had been inspired by in the 1960s. But it also seemed to have other sources. When I noticed that he had a complete set of the diaries of Lewis and Clark on his shelves, I asked him about them. It turned out he was reading the books while making “Mapping the Studio.” “I would read several days’ accounts every day,” he said. Some of these entries were just a straightforward log of longitude, latitude and distance traveled. But they recorded every day, and, Nauman said, “every day something interesting happened,” as the explorers ventured into the unknown and reported back what they saw.

Bruce Nauman, the Artist’s Artist. By  Nikil Saval. The New York Times , October 15, 2018.

Bruce Nauman : Disappearing Acts. Exhibition, through February 2019. The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, New York.