dc.description.abstract | In the first half of the 20th century, western society has gone through a dramatic transition. The industrial civilization has made a great impact on human beings in all aspects, such as politics, society, economics and culture, and it is particularly embodied by the historical phenomena of two world wars. Being an active artist in this period, Grosz has connected his artistic activities closely with this specific historical condition. This kind of connection is especially shown in his political caricatures, traditional easel paintings and photomontages. In this specific context, we can perceive an entwined dialectical relationship between two different categories of human activities, “art” and “politics.” The relationship consists of art’s criticism of politics and politics’ control over art, which is also the central issue Grosz tries to deal with.
This thesis tries to focus on Grosz’s different cultural subversion in three periods. They are respectively 1) In the time before 1920, Grosz’s style was influenced by German Expressionism and Italian Futurism. He depicted the confusion and anxiety of the people in the modern industrial society, such as the strong sensation provoked by the savageness shown in his paintings of the assaults between people in the urban jungle. Grosz also employed the mechanical reproduction method of photomontages by appropriating photos in mass media, commercial advertisements and political propagandas to criticize German capitalistic society after WWI. 2) During the time between 1920 and 1933, Grosz participated in the activities held by German communist party and conveyed the ideal of proletarian revolution in his political caricatures. He also issued several artistic criticisms to propagate the concept of “tendentious art”, claiming that artistic creativity should be in the service of a specific class, especially the proletariat, and criticized the idea of “art’s for art’s sake” espoused by expressionism. 3) In the time after 1933, Grosz turned away completely from the philosophy of art in the service of politics and returned to art itself as a standpoint to criticize every civilized system and dominant ideology. After being criticized by the communist party in the second half of 1920s, Grosz had developed an intimate relationship with some American anti-Stalinist intellectuals, which could be manifested in his later works published in Interregnum, where he denounced the efforts exercised by different political camps to control artistic activities.
To sum up, based on the three periods of Grosz’s artistic life and the idea of cultural criticism, this thesis tries to explore the constructive critical spirit revealed in his criticisms either of some obvious political events or of the latent cultural society. For example, this spirit could be manifested in artist’s criticism of the fabrication of cultural fictions in a bourgeois society during two world wars, or of authoritarianism espoused by capitalism and communism in politics after 1933. Hence, Grosz’s spirit leads us to open a new field for reconsidering the interaction between art and society. | en_US |