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COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 258 pp.; 64 b/w ills. $39.50
When Oskar Kokoschka issued an appeal calling for a cease-fire after Rubens's Bathsheba, housed in Dresden's Zwinger Gallery, was damaged by exchanges of gunfire during several days of political turmoil in the spring of 1920, he felt confident that few would argue against his impassioned plea to protect sacred art treasures from political violence. To his chagrin, George Grosz and John Heartfield assailed the cultural conservatism of their colleague and endorsed an iconoclastic position that enabled them to observe "with pleasure" the bullets that went flying into "galleries and palaces and into Rubens's masterworks." It was far better to destroy the icons of the bourgeois cult of art than to have those bullets penetrate into "the houses of the poor in workers' districts."(1) It would be another decade before Walter Benjamin was to theorize just what was at stake in Kokoschka's heavy investment in auratic art, but Grosz and Heartfield intuitively grasped the importance of bringing art down from its pedestal, refashioning it, and mobilizing it for the political struggles that lay ahead.
Years later, after emigrating to the United States, Grosz was to regret his politically engaged position and to look back on his artistic production of the 1920s as a "filthy period" during which he had abandoned authentic art and its "ideal of beauty." Yet few would be prepared to champion the historical value or artistic merit of what Grosz produced in his...
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