The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order by Barbara McCloskey (review)

In her 1997 book George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936, Barbara McCloskey examined the best-known period of the German artist's production. While addressing Grosz's role in the Berlin Dada movement, her account focused on his work for the German Communist Party and his subsequent disillusionment with the party and with politically engaged art in general. McCloskey's latest book can be seen as a sort of sequel; picking up shortly before the earlier book left off, The Exile of George Grosz considers the period from Grosz's emigration to the United States in 1933 to his death in 1959. Like her previous book, The Exile of George Grosz is meticulously researched, making effective use of Grosz's correspondence and a wide range of published works to map the political and aesthetic landscapes of his exile.

But McCloskey's new book is also a response of sorts to her earlier work, even a rebuttal. As she writes in her preface, "this study argues for the continuing relevance of Grosz's exile art over and against a Cold War cultural narrative that has long dictated unfavorable historical assessments of his American career, including my own" (xvi). McCloskey thus proposes a reassessment not only of the works that Grosz produced in America, but also of critical responses that dismissed these works as outmoded or reactionary. An exercise in redemptive criticism, her book casts Grosz's American period not as a withdrawal into apolitical irrelevance, but as a coherent response to changing political and aesthetic circumstances. The Exile of George Grosz not only calls for a new appreciation of an undervalued period in Grosz's career, it also sheds new light on developments in American and German art and criticism in the years surrounding World War II.

In keeping with the book's focus on exile, McCloskey's discussion moves between Germany and America, between political, aesthetic, and economic concerns. The book's first chapter examines Grosz's experience of New York, where he arrived as an émigré but remained as an exile, rubbing elbows with such figures as Max Horkheimer, Bertolt Brecht, and Thomas Mann. As McCloskey shows, this period was fraught with contradiction for Grosz. While his reputation was built on the politically provocative works he had produced in Germany, where the Nazis had condemned him as "Cultural Bolshevist #1" (xvi), by 1934 his faith in the workers' movement and the political potential of art had long since faded (15). What's more, as the American art world increasingly embraced abstraction, Grosz vocally defended figurative painting and drew inspiration from the northern Renaissance. This chapter thus emphasizes the conflict between the artist Grosz wanted to become and the "persecuted modernist" (11) America wanted him to be.

Subsequent chapters continue this examination of the tensions that plagued Grosz's career, while expanding on the "one world order" of the book's subtitle. As McCloskey writes, "Before [America's] entry into World War II, the American art world embraced European modernism as part of the United States' claim to the defense of free expression and democracy against tyranny. During the war years, this defense of culture changed into the affirmative projection of a new, vanguard 'globalism' in the arts" (56). While Grosz soundly rejected the totalitarianism of both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, he was hardly more sanguine about the "hegemonic aspirations" (57) of the United States, whether in geopolitics or in the ostensibly universal triumph of modernist abstraction. McCloskey's analysis thus suggests that Grosz's American works—though far removed from his biting satire of the Weimar era—contain an implicit critique of what might be termed the military-artistic complex, the advancement of a single aesthetic to represent freedom and legitimize America's global domination.

McCloskey expands on this analysis with an illuminating discussion of Grosz...