Touchstones: Essays In Literature, Art And Politics

A Dream Factory

For some aberrant reason, the idea of a museum is associated in everyday language with notions such as obsolete, anachronistic, in decline and even extinct. To call someone a ‘museum piece’ is a kind way of saying that this person is more dead than alive, a walking corpse, someone who has fallen behind the times and remained stuck in some earlier moment. But conserving certain archaeological, artistic or scientific artefacts of the past as cultural relics is just one, and by no means the most important, function that a museum fulfils. In the concrete case of an art museum, the main function is to enrich our lives with all the vitality and creativity of men and women who came before us, offering a more rounded picture of current concerns by showing how our predecessors dealt with life, the ways they heightened, or protected or intensified their existence.

A museum of art worthy of its name does not enlighten us as to the achievements, but rather as to the unachievable aspirations of earlier generations, the capacity that cultures, that are forerunners to our own, had for dreaming and desiring: that imaginary rebellion against the limitations of the human condition that takes place in every period and society. Impossible dreams, unsatisfied desires are the stuff out of which the imaginary cities of fiction have been built, that counter-reality fashioned out of great deeds, emotions or delirium which, because they cannot find expression in the real reality of history, achieved citizenship in the illusory lands of fiction, that vast invented land in which literature and art are important provinces.

A painting by Goya or Velázquez, or a novel by Cervantes, are rooted in a world that their authors lived to the full — suffering and enjoying this life with an extremely fine-tuned sensibility — but these works have transcended their time and their creators and have achieved the timeless status of great art. This is because the richness of their composition and the persuasive power of their imaginary worlds freed them from their models — those kings, bandits, go-betweens, spirited women, rogues and adventurers that they purportedly reproduced from the real world whereas, in fact, they were inventing them — and replaced these models with their own bewitching characters. Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century was not like that; or rather, it was as it appears on these canvases or in these chapters only in the fantasy and imagination of the Spaniards of those times who wanted to see themselves in this way. The artistic and literary genius of Velázquez, Goya and Cervantes was able to intuit this feeling and transform it into painted images or stories that both drew from their contemporaries’ thirst for unreality and also added their own indelible touch. The most important thing about their work is not what they drew from real life, but what they managed to add to it, in such a subtle and convincing way that now there is no way of disentangling these two strands. In Las Meninas, in the unsettling nightmares of Goya that decorated the Quinta del Sordo, and in the adventures of Don Quixote and his squire, fiction ended up prevailing over the reality that inspired it.

There are people who go to galleries to study a period, find out about customs and important events, get to know the faces of their forebears and the fashions of the women. They are perfectly entitled to do so, of course, and there is no doubt that a museum can also offer (if one takes great care) some lessons in history and sociology. But using museums in this way distorts what they contain, in the same way as someone might read a novel just to list the foreign phrases, idioms and neologisms that were in use at the time it was written. We go to a museum as we go to the cinema or to the opera, to step out of real, pedestrian life and live a sumptuous unreality, to have our fantasies embodied in other people’s fantasies, to travel outside ourselves, to discover the ghosts that are lurking in our innermost being, to change skin and to become other men and women in other times and other places, to flee the precise limitations of the human condition and what is possible so that we can become for some eternal moments or hours many other people while remaining ourselves, ubiquitous, without moving from where we are, eternal, though we are mortal and all-powerful without losing our miserable smallness. Because an art museum is not really a laboratory or an historical archive, it is a dream factory.

The Prado Museum, along with a handful of similar museums — the Louvre, the Hermitage, the National Gallery, the Uffizi, Pinacoteca Gallery in the Vatican, the Munich art museum and very few others — is one of those places where, thanks to a combination of historical circumstance, chance and the initiative of certain immensely wealthy, powerful, tasteful or far-sighted individuals, an art collection has been put together that is so extraordinarily important and diverse that it far exceeds any attempt to quantify it economically or see it as the property of a single nation. It becomes, instead, a representative of an entire civilisation and the patrimony of the world. André Malraux put it well in Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence): ‘Above all, a museum is one of those places which shows man at his best.’

It would be unjust if we were to consider that because the immense majority of the painters and sculptors exhibited there are European, the Prado should not be considered a universal collection and be seen just as representative of the Old World. The art it exhibits is a fine example of the universal reach of this Western culture whose aesthetic ideals, along with its most conspicuous values — freedom, tolerance, human rights — have permeated the whole world, affecting all living cultures, even the most exotic, including men and women of every hue. Because the first message that hits a visitor to the gallery is that the world of artistic imagination, at this level of skill and daring, lacks borders, transcends space and time, and is firmly rooted — beyond the stories that the works tell and the fleeting times that they allude to — to a single common denominator that is the human condition, the tragic fate of men and women to have been given, at once, the ability to fantasise and to desire a richer and more diverse life, and the limitations of having just one destiny, which falls well short of our dreams. Art and literature were born to fill that chasm between reality and desire, and there is no better proof of the extraordinary strength with which humanity has rebelled against its fate, creating another world, another life, another humanity better than, and different to, reality, than the prodigious universe of images confined to the walls of the Prado Museum.

To understand the essentially fictitious nature of this alternative reality that is art it is not necessary to immerse oneself in the work of the great visionaries, like The Garden of Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, who gave shape to all the celestial and hellish terrors of medieval philosophy, blending them with his personal nightmares, or The Triumph of Death by Pieter Brueghel, whose apocalyptic imagination catches the decisive moment when human beings face what is beyond, or Goya’s Caprichos, which plum the gloomy depths of the subconscious. Simply pause and look at the so-called ‘realist’ painters, for example the still lifes in which Juan Van der Hamen y León, Tomás de Yepes, Sánchez Cotán or Zurbarán purport to reproduce fruit, vegetables, cooking items or hunting pieces with such prodigious objectivity that they appear self-sufficient, not the creation of a controlling mind, hand and brush. But it is clear that they are also pure subjectivity, perhaps more so than the great mythological or biblical fantasies, because they manage to persuade us that they are ‘pieces of reality’, portraits of what exists — ornaments, utensils or items of food — whose very perfection lifts them out of this imperfect real world of their models, which is subject to deterioration, ageing and extinction, a world that they can deny each day with their eternal freshness and youth. The four plates and the bare wooden table in Zurbarán’s Still Life, with its light and shade and its delicate contrasts of colour, is as mysterious and magical as a fantastic picture by Caravaggio or the intense spirituality of an El Greco. It is the discreet or flagrant alterations to reality, the creation of self-contained worlds which is the true domain of art, that element added by the artist to the materials that their time, their society, their own biography of heroic or petty deeds placed at their disposal, which through their skill and creativity they managed to transform into something different, something that we will later clearly associate with them. The way that Rubens rounds and thickens the female body in pink hues, fashioning it into sensual courtly, historic or mythological images; the way that El Greco slims and elongates and diffuses the human form in pale and iridescent light, in search of transcendence; or how in Goya men and women become animalised and degraded when they become a collective, a stupid and fanatical mass.

These wonderful fictions and many others like them — Flemish, Italian, English, German, French as well as Spanish — housed by the Prado, all had their origins in a defiance of the real world, but they have gradually become part of the real world through us, they have been subtly contaminating reality with their forms and values. Like in the Borges story, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in which a group of romantic dreamers manage to smuggle a completely invented world into reality, the rich imaginative reality of these artists in the Prado is there, at our service, to show us that the imaginary, this subterfuge of unsatisfied desires, is also of this world, an achievable experience. In the halls and corridors of the Prado, there is sustenance for all the demands of body and soul, the walls are full of myriad examples of how to combat adversity with the arm of fantasy, of how to defeat dissatisfaction by gorging oneself on beauty, of how to overcome the grey mediocrity of existence by turning it into the terrifying or majestic lives depicted there. The dazzling riches of the Prado is the best example there is that museums are not mausoleums but rather a city of living, vibrant beings, in constant movement, where reality and desire meld to create the life that we do not have, that we long for and that we can only achieve, vicariously, in the mirages of fiction.

London, January 1996

Grosz: A Sad and Ferocious Man

Here comes Grosz,

The saddest man in Europe.²⁹

In the spring of 1985, during one of those exhausting book tours I agree to for reasons which are still beyond me, I escaped for a couple of hours to the Palazzo Reale in Milan, to see an exhibition dedicated to Gli anni di Berlino of George Grosz. Three months later, in the torrid Italian summer, I made a special trip to see the exhibition once again in the fantastic (artistically speaking) city of Ferrara. And, some time later, I was lucky enough to see it for a third and final time in the exhibition hall in the Mairie in Paris.

I already knew that Grosz was an artist whose work and life were very important to me, more than most modern painters that I admire or remember, for reasons to do with his talent, of course, but also because his work illustrates an important aspect of artistic creation: the relationship of art and fiction to history and life, to truth and lies, the type of testimony that fiction offers on the objective world. And I also knew — and I would know it more clearly in the following years, as I travelled the world in search of accessible material by or on Grosz — that my fascination for what he painted, drew, wrote, and did or did not do in his sixty-six years, could be explained through certain affinities and differences that I will try to explain in this essay. These might help to clear up some misunderstandings about the nature of fiction in art and about one of the most interesting artists of the twentieth century.

Grosz (his real name was Georg Ehrenfried Groß) was born in Berlin on 26 July 1893, but spent his early years in a small town in eastern Pomerania, Stolp, where his father looked after the Masonic Lodge. Gloomy stories, of coffins and mummies guarded by masons in that house, excited the imagination of the Stolp children and perhaps sowed in Grosz the first seeds of what would later become his obsession with death, a recurring presence in his paintings and drawings.

His father must have been rough, and perhaps brutal, because in his autobiography (Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein, a book where there are as many omissions as there are memories) Grosz mentions that he scared him and his sister Marta by showing them dancing skeletons in the garden. He died when the boy was six years old.

The family returned to Berlin, where they faced penury and danger in the streets, in the working-class neighbourhood of Wedding, until his mother managed to return to Stolp as a cook in the hussars’ barracks. Grosz spent his childhood and his adolescence there, and he studied in the local school until 1908 when, just before the end of his secondary studies, he was expelled for hitting a teacher.

Among the hussars of Prince Blücher, in Stolp, he doubtless learned to hate with all his heart (that extreme hate which, as the saying goes, is akin to love) Prussian officers, one of the main characters of the world that he immortalised (others are capitalists, criminals, religious people, the proletariat and whores). It was the Prussian officers that he perhaps caricatured with the greatest ferocity and vehemence. I use the word ‘hate’ advisedly, because without that destructive and exasperated passion that the word implies, Grosz’s work would not have been possible; nor would it have been possible without the extreme simplifications that a unilateral and schematic view of reality tends to convey.

He studied painting for two years (1909–1911) at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden, where stultifying teachers versed in the classics made him copy plaster statues and Hellenic marbles, and where his instructor, Richard Müller (who would later collaborate with the Nazis) thought that Van Gogh’s sunsets were ‘shit’ and that the expressionist Emil Nolde was a ‘filthy pig’. At that time, Grosz dreamed of being a local epic painter, of military triumphs, in the style of Grützner. And he was a voracious reader of adventure stories — James Fenimore Cooper, Karl May, Sherlock Holmes stories, Robinson Crusoe — as well as the popular serial novels full of horror and crimes that he confessed to having an early fascination for, alongside the terrifying and magical acts performed in fairs and circuses. All of this would help to form his artistic personality as much as, or even more than, his time at the Academy.

After he received his diploma, in 1911, he moved to Berlin, where he continued studying graphic art for a time, at the School of Arts and Crafts, while he sent drawings and caricatures to different publications. He had also begun to illustrate books. His first work accepted for publication, in 1910, in the magazine Ulk, depicts two stylised gentlemen watching an elegant couple go by: a conventional, bourgeois, scene, a thousand miles from the world that he would invent in the following years. But, from 1911, there begin to appear traces of the apocalyptic vision that would later be fuelled by the butchery of the First World War, the social and political struggles of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), and the intense Berlin years of Dadaism, revolution, artistic experimentation, anarchy, utopian dreams and bohemian life that preceded Hitler’s and Nazism’s coming to power on 30 January 1933.

Among these most visible traces are violence associated with sex, suicide and crimes. Some critics interpret this macabre propensity as a metaphorical description of a repressive society, the Imperial Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in which the strict and narrow moral codes that sought to curb the instincts, desires and fantasies of good citizens had instead the opposite effect of increasing neuroses and encouraging perversion and sexual violence. But it is also possible to detect in Grosz’s drawings in these years — peopled by strangled women (Ehebruch (Adultery), 1913), decapitated women, caught in adultery or dismembered, families that sacrifice themselves (Das Ender der Straße (The End of the Road), 1913), deformed beings (Abnormitaten, (Monsters), 1913), men attacking other men with axes, knives or guns, or maddened crowds that seem about to tear each other apart or else explode (Pandemonium (1915–16) — a Baudelairian maudit aesthetic, full of excess, extravagance, distortions and human ferocity, which the society of his time seemed to condemn, but in truth found seductive and stimulating. Because all these mutilations, ugliness and crimes are not depicted in an accusatory manner, but rather with an (albeit implied) sense of indulgence, akin to the festive way that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his horror stories. Grosz sketched an imaginary portrait of Poe in 1913, Wie ich mir Edgar Allan Poe vorstelle (How I Imagine Edgar Allan Poe), and his work would inspire him to draw that same year Der Doppelmord in der Rue Morgue (The Double Crime in the Rue Morgue). But whereas the work of Poe, Barbey d’Aurevilly and other horror writers tends towards rather unreal, abstract fantasies, in Grosz horror is always firmly rooted in real life. ‘I can paint a devil, but I can’t paint an angel,’ he once said.³⁰ That’s right; but his devils always give the impression of being of flesh and blood.

The 1914–18 war had a traumatic effect on Grosz’s life. It accentuated the pessimistic and anarchic aspects of his personality and it furnished him with many experiences — images, rage — that would help shape the extreme, apocalyptic, dissolute and dogmatic nature of his artistic vision. How he was involved in the war itself is not at all clear. When the conflict broke out, Grosz enrolled as a volunteer in the grenadiers of the second Kaiser Francis. Six months later, in May 1915, he was exempted from service for medical reasons. From what he has said, and from what has been unearthed, it would seem that he spent most of this time suffering from sinusitis in hospitals behind the lines, where the wounded and mutilated were sent and where, of course, the pestilence, suffering and squalor were indescribable. There the war had nothing heroic to it: it appeared exclusively in all its savagery and stupidity. He was called up again on 4 January 1917, but was almost immediately interned in a psychiatric hospital in Gorden, suffering from a nervous breakdown, as a result of which he was officially declared as unfit for the army in April of that year. It seems that a famous Berlin sexologist, Dr Hirschfield, and a tycoon and patron of the arts, Count Harry Kessler, pulled some strings to have him returned to civilian life, away from a war that — as his letters and drawings of this time reveal — he abhorred with all his being.

In those years of the First World War, he contracted — the way you contract a disease — a furious indignation against his country and against his compatriots, that is well illustrated in this extract from a letter of 1916 to Robert Bell: ‘Day by day, my hatred for Germans grows with the irremediably ugly, anti-aesthetic (yes, anti-aesthetic) and horrible appearance of most Germans in Germany. To put it as crudely as I can: “I feel no kinship at all with such a mess.”’³¹ In this rather ‘unpatriotic’ state of mind, he painted his first masterpieces, among which were some oil paintings, a technique that he had begun to use in 1907. One of the most vigorous of these paintings, dating between 1917 and 1919, has either been lost or was one of his numerous ‘degenerate’ works destroyed by the Nazis: Deutschland, ein Wintermarchen (Germany, a Winter’s Tale). Even seeing it as a reproduction, the powerful language and the fevered imagination jolts us. His world is already there in place, in a picture that revolves around a uniformed bourgeois character, a monster of indifference and egotism, who sits in the centre of the picture, armed with a knife and fork, surrounded by food, beer and reactionary newspapers, satisfying his needs while all around chaos ensues. At his feet, three puppets — a priest, a soldier and a schoolteacher — represent the institutions that defend his interests and privileges. None of the four individuals seems too perturbed by the surrounding devastation: fires, landslides, and the disappearance of the law of gravity, because everything is turning, getting muddled and falling down. It’s true that there’s a spark in the little eyes of the bourgeois; but perhaps it isn’t fear, but rather excitement at the proximity of his pleasure. A naked woman, with fat thighs and buttocks and pendulous breasts, comes through the chaos unscathed. The painter himself has slipped into the bottom left-hand corner of the picture: a frowning man who is watching the end of the world quite unperturbed. That’s how he would also later describe himself in an ink drawing of 1917: Straßenszene mit Zeichner (Street Scene with Arist). He’s drawing with his pipe in his mouth, sitting in the midst of the city bustle, looking not at his paper but at the distorted landscape surrounding him: buildings, many crosses, and a little deformed man looking covetously at a naked woman, with a skull’s face, whose sex seems to be a spider. The artist, immersed in this world, also keeps his distance from it: he is creating, not describing, it.

Another of Grosz’s great paintings, the Widmung an Oskar Panizza (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza) is also a visionary representation in which death — a skeleton sitting on a coffin — is leading an infernal procession, like those in the nightmares of a Brueghel or a Hieronymus Bosch, painters much admired by Grosz. Within the bloody glow that bathes the picture, emanating from fires devouring buildings, a maddened crowd dehumanised by excesses and fear — with animal faces, or faces stripped of skin — is dying in a holocaust. Among them, some ridiculous characters are behaving in an absurd way: they are waving flags, brandishing sabres or crucifixes, blowing bugles. In the midst of the flames and the general dissolution, you can make out female forms. Everything is measured and oblique, everything is criss-crossed by planes that introduce geometric confusion and disorder into the old rational symmetry of the world.

John der Frauenmörder (John The Lady Killer, now in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg) dates from 1918. In this oil painting, with its contrasting strong colours made fashionable by Expressionism, we find on the same plane the victim, a naked woman with her neck severed, and her assassin, a stiff, well-dressed little man who is fleeing through the streets of a burning city. The insufferable tension in the picture comes from the subtle blend of story and language; the oblique planes emphasise the violence of the bloody corpse, and the flames in the buildings suggest instability and change, as does the instability of the perspective. And the green, yellow and black tones of the criminal express his cruelty as much as the murdered body of his victim. The image of women with their throat slit obsessed Grosz in this period, and in 1918 alone he produced three very similar pictures. His best works of the war and the post-war period would be like these paintings: blood-drenched incidents involving individuals or larger groups.

Although among his great work one must always single out at least a dozen oil paintings, Grosz’s genius lay not so much in his paintings as in his work as a graphic artist: a cartoonist, caricaturist, engraver, illustrator, poster designer, publicist, and a designer of book covers and theatre costumes and sets. As Orwell did in his newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and book reviews, Grosz invested in these ‘minor’ genres all the energy, imagination and rigour that other creators put into the ‘major’ genres, making them distinctive, lasting works of art. This is one of the achievements that I admire most in him, and in Orwell, who is similar to Grosz in a number of ways, including his ideas about politics. He used the forms that were most accessible to the general public, the most advanced technologies, to express his inner world, his obsessions and his fury, without sacrificing his moral independence and the right that every artist has to be a critic and to experiment with form.

Like Orwell, Grosz always found repugnant any idea of ‘Art’ with a capital ‘a’, reserved for an elite of pretentious people, light years away from ordinary men and women. According to his son Marty, every time reverential admirers praised his ‘artistic’ achievements, Grosz hurled abuse at them: ‘Kunst ist Scheiße’ (‘Art is shit’).³² The media that he worked in were a way of opposing dominant ideas about specialisation in art, looking instead to re-establish the link that once existed between the artist and the whole of society, when ‘art’, which was inseparable from magic and religion, was one of the basic needs of life. The choice of popular ‘genres’, however, did not mean that Grosz, unlike other artists who were committed to producing ‘popular art’, did not pay attention to technique. Instead, he worked intensively to create a language that was direct and accessible but also intense and original.

The arrival of Dadaism in Berlin in 1918 — from Zurich and the work of Richard Huelsenbeck — gave Grosz an appropriate climate — a philosophy and certain techniques — to give full rein to his anarchism and iconoclasm, to his fury and virulence against the political regime and the institutions of the nascent Weimar Republic, and to his revolutionary dreams, that were more destructive than constructive, and would keep him in the Communist party until 1925. (He joined the party in 1918, along with other Berlin Dadaists like John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde and Erwin Piscator.) From that time he contributed to all the Dadaist magazines, manifestos and shows, he printed his first collections of lithographs, edited and illustrated innumerable avant-garde and revolutionary publications, was involved in scandals, married Eva Peter, his lifelong companion, organised individual exhibitions, was tried and fined three times for blasphemy and insulting the army, and lived to the full all the excesses, madness, fun and the political and cultural polemics of the twenties. These years prepared the ground for the second great European apocalypse, but they were also extraordinarily dynamic in artistic terms.

These are Grosz’s great years. He was the leading artist in Berlin, in Germany, throughout the Weimar period. His two folders of lithographs, Erste George Grosz-Mappe and Kleine Grosz-Mappe date from 1917; the third, much more political than the previous two, Gott Mit Uns (God is with Us), is from 1920. As would happen later in his career, these engravings had already appeared before as drawings in different exhibitions and publications.

In these years, Grosz would achieve a solid reputation, but he would also be subject to irate criticism from conservative sectors, which attacked him for his obscenity, anti-militarism and blasphemy, and, at times, even from his comrades in the Communist Party, who felt obliged to keep their distance from his iconoclastic excesses. The party publication Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), for example, condemned as ‘perverse’ and ‘idiot forms of kitsch’ the paintings and objects of the First Dadaist Exhibition in Berlin (July and August 1920), in which Grosz exhibited nine engravings/lithographs from Gott Mit Uns, for which he was taken to court and fined three hundred marks (the court also ordered the destruction of the plates).

Grosz’s world is, indeed, too individualist, arbitrary, obsessive and violent to serve the interests and objectives of a political party, even a party looking to reconstruct society root and branch. He very rarely offered a positive view of the proletariat and any future classless society. His 1919 drawing Wie der Staatsgerichtshof aussehen musste (How Courts Should Act), in which, beneath a portrait of the revolutionary leader Karl Liebkneth, a court of workers and peasants is trying a handful of generals in chains, is unusual in this respect. Instead, almost all his work of this period seems to be intent on satirising and expressing disgust at the military, the bourgeoisie, leaders and religious people, and describing, in extremely minute detail, degenerate and criminal elements.

A pen-and-ink drawing from 1917, Als alles vorbei war, spielten sie Karten (When that finished, they started playing cards), which would appear in his book Ecce Homo (1923), with the title Apachen (Apaches), shows three horrifying individuals around a table, playing cards with icy tranquillity, after having murdered and dismembered a woman. A leg of the victim is sticking up out of one of the murderer’s chairs and the blurred mutilated body is in a corner. On the floor of the squalid room there is a woman’s boot, a basin and the axe and knife used for the crime. We can’t talk about ‘black humour’ here, because there is no humour, just macabre blackness, a life reduced to its essential cruel and grotesque components. And yet there is something about these three ferocious figures, their amorphous size, their rigid, slumped forms, their dead eyes, that is rather pathetic, a hint of humanity that seems to be accusing us. The design is simple and precisely realist.

The word ‘realist’ is inevitable when it comes to describing Grosz’s world, as well as saying that it is urban, cataclysmic, full of sensuality, sex, blood, egotism, exploitation and cruelty. Also that it is elemental and primary, without nuance, ambiguity, generous gestures, compassion or lofty feelings. The people that inhabit this world are stupid puppets, vulgar bipeds thirsting for material pleasures, like eating, drinking, fornicating, exploiting their neighbours, going to war, as well as baroque excesses like slaughtering and decapitating other human beings. Is this life? Was this Berlin in the twenties? Of course not. Why use the word realist, then, to describe such an extravagant caricature? Because even though it is completely deformed and stripped of all positive aspects and complexity, the life reflected in Grosz’s ‘fiction’ is rooted in this common fund of shared experience, and we can recognise in it something that we are as well. The animate and inanimate beings of this world are joined by a very thin umbilical chord to the beings in our world — their carnal desires and the space they move in — and the artist’s skill has given them a persuasive power that overcomes any reservations we might have about their evil, their mechanised being or their ugliness (that is their unreality).

In an autobiographical text from 1925, entitled Abwicklung (Liquidation),³³ Grosz tells us that in order to make his objects as rough and virulent as possible, he studied the crudest impulses of artistic creation, the graffiti in public urinals and street doodles, which expressed very directly ‘the most powerful instincts’. He also felt that children’s drawings stimulated him ‘through their lack of ambiguity’. In his early exercise books and notebooks there are copies of slogans and images that he has seen in city streets. Indeed, in many of Grosz’s drawings in the twenties, especially in the first years of the decade, there are many echoes of these spontaneous, inexperienced attempts at producing images. Grosz looked for inspiration and models that chimed with his own view of life. The elemental and dogmatic views that he upheld required, for the sake of coherence, an equally simple and primary form: little men that seem like the stick figures that children doodle, or obscene graffiti where, in the loneliness of public toilets or in the darkness of the night, certain people give expression to filthy and disgusting feelings. The outlook and the form complement each other so successfully that they create an entire reality, different to that other reality — the real world — but linked to it by a powerful mixture of contrasting feelings: repulsion and fascination, hatred and desire, attraction and a desire to escape.

Grosz’s world is very personal, but not solipsistic, as would be the case, in those years, with many other artists, above all those that abandoned figurative art. In his work there are many aspects that would appeal not just to his progressive contemporaries, but also to very large numbers of apolitical people. Take, for example, his criticism and condemnation of militarism, the old military caste that, despite the fall of the empire, continued to dominate the army and was a very troublesome legacy for the republican regime. They were responsible for losing the war and for the limitless sufferings of the German people. The merciless satires and caricatures that Grosz launched against the rituals, personalities, mythology and emblems of the military world were interpreted as being ideological. But it was not historical materialism and the class struggle that were the real sources of inspiration, but rather an irresistible desire to provoke and offend the people who best symbolise, in any regime, those aspects of the world most odious to an individualist, seditious and anarchic spirit such as his: force, discipline, hierarchies and order.

The collection Gott Mit Uns contains his best anti-militarist prints. Perhaps the most famous of these is K.V. (Die Gesundbeter) (The Quack Doctors), which is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (K.V. stands for kriegsverwendungsfahig: fit for active service). An army doctor declares as ‘fit for service’ a skeleton that he is examining with a stethoscope. The picture is framed by high-ranking officers standing around smoking and chatting, indifferent to the farce that they are party to, and by upright, automaton soldiers. The two generals in the foreground, seen in profile, have that look that is common to many of Grosz’s characters, somewhere between a clown and a wild beast: bald heads, walrus moustaches, bull necks enclosed in stiff uniform collars, epaulettes, monocles, open jaws, butcher’s teeth, doll-like stiffness. There is something profoundly stupid, as well as carnivalesque, about these stunted human beings that seem to be enslaved by rituals that are absurd and yet can cause immense grief and violence. The tone is sarcastic, and the scene is also very claustrophobic, with the bare walls and barred windows through which one can glimpse skyscrapers, chimneys and clouds of smoke.

It is not just the ferocity and insolence of the artist’s vision that is so impressive in this and in other drawings. It is true that they can be seen as a bilious attack on a certain state of affairs, an important moment in history. But if the vigorous energy of this work depended just on its historical content, then it would have become more anodyne or have disappeared altogether with the passing of time. The fact that it makes such an impact today, when ‘German militarism’ is now a thing of the past, is because this drawing also offers its own coherent and tightly structured world, full of colourful and terrifying buffoons and horrifying victims that have a life of their own. It is a creative response to real life: the deceitful world of fiction. A life without which the other life, the one that we live and not the one we dream, would be much more difficult to endure. That is why certain exceptionally talented people, like Grosz, have invented, with all the force of their imagination and technique, this parallel and autonomous life found in great artistic fictions.

Until he left Germany in 1933, and above all in the immediate post-war years, military men constantly appear in Grosz’s world, in all their ridiculousness, ordering massacres, playing the macabre game of war, repressing workers, killing communists or simply exhibiting their ugly loud-mouthed faces, pitted with duelling scars, along with their dress swords, pistols, helmets and medals, often including swastikas. And in squalid, plebeian contrast to this military aristocracy stifled in their operatic parade uniforms, we find the former soldiers, turned by the war into mere shadows of human beings, armless, eyeless, leaning on their prosthetic limbs, starving, dragging their wretched figures through the streets, begging or selling knick-knacks in café or brothel doors.

But these former soldiers, like the proletariat — whom we glimpse only rarely, always in the background, tied to an execution post, run through by a bayonet, setting out at dawn for the factory, or sweating in the factories to make the bosses rich — are, compared to the military, secondary figures in the farcical world of Grosz. This is a world of oppressors rather than victims.

By contrast, the capitalist is also a prominent figure and is always centre stage, as in the marvellous sketch in the sixth issue of Die Pleite magazine (January 1920), where we find a general and a bourgeois gentleman dangling from scaffolds, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy New Year. The capitalist is described — invented — with the same tremendous excess as the military man. He is also a repulsive puppet. Whether he is a millionaire or a small-scale landlord, he is always seen as unsatisfied in his desires, always desperate for more money, more drink, more food and more women. He preens himself like a coquette, but he oozes vulgarity. He surveys his companies with shameless delight, stating, implacably, ‘I will destroy everything that prevents me from being the absolute master of this’ (an illustration for Schiller’s Die Rauber (The Robber)), or, brandishing a cigar, smoking, his hands in his waistcoat, his head in the clouds, showing the wretched of the world his immense stomach in which even his entrails are shaped like his factories (the illustration for Die Drie Soldaten (The Three Soldiers) by Bertolt Brecht in 1930).

Capitalists make an appearance in cafés, count their money wads with their little eyes gleaming with greed, they dress in furs, watch-chains gleam in their waistcoats, they disport walking sticks and umbrellas, dress coats, cravats, top hats, round metal glasses, stiff collars, carnations in their buttonholes, walking their dogs in the street, kneeling in front of military men, kissing their swords and boots, eating and drinking until they are sick, spending their nights in nightclubs, frolicking with whores or with their wives whom they treat like whores. Among their fantasies are sadism and masochism and they are inveterate voyeurs. They play cards, speculate on war, preach sacrifice to their workers, they are patriots, nationalists and Nazis. In the intimacy of their bedrooms, they like to loosen their braces, unbutton their flies, stretch their legs and look covetously at the ample flesh of their lovers or wives or prostitutes.

Grosz’s best collection — Ecce Homo, eighty-four lithographs and sixteen watercolours (Berlin, 1923) — mainly concentrates on these men. Here the bourgeois reigns, repellent, abusive, egotistical, hypocritical, a mediocre monster drunk with power and sensuality. In the most caustic of these images, the watercolour Kraft und Anmut (Force and Grace, 1922), you can see him with his hands in his pockets, in an elegant brown suit and a green tie, his jutting chin defying the world. Is he looking through the window at the properties that he has already acquired, or at those that will soon fall into his grasp? His posture, his expression, his square face, the muscles in his enormous neck, his open legs all signal an absolute confidence in himself, the security of someone who has possessions and who is in charge. Behind him, on the yellow quilt and the maroon cushions, in quiet desperation, or stretched out in a suggestive pose, is the third central figure in this crude and strident social trinity envisaged by Grosz: the prostitute. She wears pink slippers and black stockings, she has coloured ornaments on her white slip, which reveals some thigh and the mounds of her breasts. Her eyes reflect the tiredness of pleasure, her mouth is half open and, by the way that she is showing them off, she seems to be proud of her hairy armpits. This blatant vulgarity represents ‘Grace’ in Grosz’s twisted world.

This paradise of militarism, exploitation and other bourgeois vices is also a relentlessly macho world, cruel to women. Women exist to be observed naked, to be fondled, hit, humiliated, murdered or cut up like a piece of meat. Because here women, as in the sermons of Puritan fanatics excoriating ‘sins of the flesh’, seem to possess the sinister gift of bringing out the worst in men, of turning them into beasts, as literally occurs in a 1928 drawing, Ruf der Wildnis (The Call of the Wild), in which five people looking at a dancer shaking her thighs grow the mouths and snouts of pigs. It comes as no surprise to learn, therefore, that the young Grosz was fascinated by the mythical figure of Circe, who turned men into pigs. There are at least two drawings dedicated to her, from 1912 and 1913: in one she is a modern woman with a hat, and in the other she has high heels and is smoking a cigarette, enthroned, in Olympian fashion, above groups of animalistic men, who are cowering at her feet. Women appear in Grosz’s world stretched out in voluptuous poses, showing their sex or their buttocks to bourgeois males with their flies undone who observe them as potential victims or as mere instruments of pleasure. They also appear in transparent dressing gowns and petticoats, in black stockings, half naked but wearing hats, jewels, chains and crosses. All these are the marks of the courtesan or professional woman of pleasure, or of bourgeois ladies who have become corrupted: these are the only parts they are allowed to play by the shadowy lustful males who dominate the world. Even when they get dressed and go out, to sit in a café or go for a walk, they cannot escape their nature and condition: their clothes are transparent and reveal their fat thighs, their heavy breasts and their enormous buttocks. Their appearance is the same, like the soldiers and the bourgeois men, whether they are gyrating at the top of a rope, doing acrobatics, gossiping in cafés, flirting in parties or opening their legs in the bedroom: plump, bags under their eyes, painted, pure flesh without brains or spirit, shameless, vulgar and artificial.

Grosz grew up in a rural area of a region that was the bastion of very strict Protestantism, where families respected the pious customs of Wilhelm’s Germany. In his autobiography he remembers that in his youth convention dictated that the female form should be hidden by demure bodices, girdles and layers of clothing, without even an ankle showing, and that ‘decent women’ were not even allowed to cross their legs. He also recounts in great detail the miraculous, unreal experience of seeing as a child a friend’s aunt undressing, thus discovering the intimacy of the female form. Whether it is true or false, the anecdote reveals the tremendous repressive atmosphere surrounding sex and the twisted, overheated effect that this had on male erotic fantasies. Without this background, one cannot understand how the depiction of women, sex and desire in Grosz’s drawings from the Berlin years could be so grotesque and violent, and so much like a sermon on chastity delivered by a preacher.

That is why some critics call him a ‘moralist’. He does not seem to have been so in the post-war years, when the republic ushered in a spectacular liberation in behaviour, especially in the artistic, bohemian world of Berlin. Although he was a very dedicated worker, he enjoyed on at least several occasions those alcoholic and cocaine-fuelled binges where everything was possible, and he wrote about an orgy in his studio that lasted twenty-four hours. But it is certainly the case that when he came to paint, and doubtless contrary to his rational beliefs, there welled up from some inner place someone who was frightened by and furious at the mysteries of sex, someone who never felt himself on equal terms with women, or who had never rid himself totally from the inhibitions that are always at the root of the apocalyptic desires, the violence and the humiliation associated with physical love. Although he knew of Freud’s efforts, which were very fashionable in Germany at the time, to have the different aspects of sex treated naturally, as an essential part of life, he could not have taken them very seriously. (He dedicated a sardonic watercolour to him in 1922, Professor Freud gewidmet, in which we see this elegant gentleman with his tongue hanging out, surrounded by ample naked and half-naked ladies).

In any event, in Grosz’s fictional world, women and sex have nothing to do with love, for there is no place for that, or with pleasure, if we take pleasure to mean something that enriches the life of men and women, but rather they are the exclusive domain of the violence, cruelty and animal instincts of a world in which the only possible relationship between the two sexes appears to be one of domination and destruction. The word ‘libertinism’ that in the eighteenth century came to describe the delicate ways in which a culture free from sexual taboos staged the act of physical love through a series of games and rituals, dignifying it, sublimating it and turning it into an elegant and imaginative art, where men and women play the leading roles, is at the opposite extreme to the elemental and paroxysmic erotic world of Grosz. With very few exceptions, like the splendid pen-and-ink drawing of 1912 entitled Orgie, in which several couples intertwine in an enthusiastic pagan celebration of instinct,³⁴ there are no games, ceremonies, play, enjoyment, humour or feeling: just copulation, blood and animality.

Perhaps Grosz was taking his revenge on these unconscious manifestations of his Puritan education, by making religious people another puppet in his artistic world. Because blasphemy has an equally prominent place as murder, suicide and female buttocks, especially in the drawings of Hintergrund (Backcloth), where the vitriol is directed at priests and at Christianity. It is true that these drawings and cartoons are not as strongly focused as his diatribes against soldiers or bankers. The pastor or priest can be seen supporting the execution of workers by executioners dressed as bosses (Das Vaterunser (The Paternoster), 1921). In the midst of infernal cataclysms, he raises his cross and gives blessings, as if justifying or denying the horrors. The enemy of truth and compassion, he is a naïve or blasphemous cynic, who finds it amusing to balance a cross on the end of his nose (Seid untertan der Obrigkeit (Obedience to Authority), 1928), and a militarist: he delivers bellicose sermons and what comes out of his mouth are not words but bullets, sabres and mortars (Das Ausschüttung des heiligen Geistes (The Dividends of the Holy Spirit), 1928). He is also seen as servile to the powers that be — capitalists and the military. Hypocritical, grim and shadowy, he is another of the ‘pillars of society’.

This is the title of one of the most vivid oil paintings that Grosz produced in 1926, his most fertile year for painting, Stutzen der Gesellschaft, now in the Nationgalerie in Berlin. Out of the by now quintessential background of fires and soldiers advancing swords in hand, four figures emerge. There is an intellectual who is waving an olive branch, clutching his pencil and newspapers, wearing a chamber pot on his head, a pathetic emblem of the importance of his ideas. A social democrat has a little national flag and a badge proclaiming, ‘Socialismus ist Arbeit’ (‘Socialism is work’), but out of the top of his head comes not arguments but a pile of shit. But it is the terrifying Nazi bourgeois capitalist in the foreground who is the most unforgettable image. He looks horrendous — with a carnivorous mouth, a monocle, a scar and an open skull that contains a lancer on horseback instead of his brains — and in each hand he carries a symbol of his ideals: a glass of beer and a sabre. Above the three of them, with his arms outstretched and the expression of a predator surveying carrion, we find the religious figure, dressed in a black habit: his ferocious smile makes it very clear that he approves of the posturing and the horror around him, and that perhaps he even lives off it all.

The extraordinary force of the picture transcends its critical focus and historical references and comes across to us as an autonomous fictive reality, the product of a corrosive imagination and an immense artistic skill. A reality depicting alienation, barbarity, theatricality and stupidity, drawn in aggressive colours that seem to be forced to coexist despite being essentially repellent, and full of an exaggerated number of figures, objects and narratives in a reduced space. We feel the claustrophobia, the violence and the madness of a humanity that has lost its direction and is heading towards inevitable catastrophe.

In these years — from 1925 to 1928 — Grosz went back to painting after a long period working almost exclusively as a graphic artist. In this period he produced some of the most remarkable oil paintings of our time. Like Sonnenfinsternis (The Eclipse of the Sun) of 1926, in the Hecksher Museum, Huntington, New York, in which the capitalist and the general (in this case, Marshal Hindenburg, the President of the Republic) are giving orders to a group of bare-headed politicians. Or Agitator (The Demagogue) of 1928, in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and a number of important portraits and self-portraits, in particular — a work of genius — the portrait of his friend, the writer and critic Max Herrmann-Neisse, of 1925 (in the Kunsthalle Mannheim).

Grosz made many pencil and charcoal sketches in preparation for this painting, which he worked on very carefully and slowly, according to his correspondence and the accounts of friends who visited his workshop. The result is a work that is both disconcerting and dazzling, a key element in his fiction: a little worm-like man, hunched up and getting smaller and smaller in front of our eyes. His bald head has shrunk almost to the top of the backrest of the chair, embroidered with red, blue and yellow flowers, where he is sitting. Very likely, if we kept watching him, he would carry on shrinking into a tiny figure, or even disappear, as in a fantasy story. His funeral garb, his large bony hands, the red ring on his finger, the slippers and gleaming bald head, his puckered mouth and blood-red lips, the way his head sinks into his curved chest: everything about him is strange, violates the norms, and yet at the same time there is something about this little gnome that we identify straight away, the inexorable life within him, perhaps the life of ideas, dreams and desires that inhabit his wretched body, or simply the life force that is his will to live, to defy the death that has already paid him a call and has begun to devour him. Grosz’s passion for macabre, grotesque and fantastic imagery can clearly be seen in this work, yet it does not lose its ‘realist’ appearance. This is one of the peculiarities of his art: it can be caught up in a mad flight of fantasy without ever departing from lived experience, without sinking into artifice or abstraction. Among the innumerable ‘monsters’ that emerged from Grosz’s pencils and brushes, few are as original and strange as this portrait.

During his years in Berlin, Grosz designed sets and costumes for several theatre productions, the most famous of which was the production staged by his friend Erwin Piscator, an adaptation of the Czech novel by Haroslav Jasek, The Good Soldier Schwejk. Along with supplying more than three hundred drawings for the cartoon film that Piscator used as a backcloth for the show — and which commented on, illustrated and, on occasion, took part in the action — Grosz, along with Bertolt Brecht, provided many ideas and suggestions for what would be remembered as one of the most memorable productions of the Weimar period. According to one critic, Grosz contributed above all else a sense of ‘ferocity’ as well as accentuating the anti-militarism of the piece.³⁵ Although the film has been lost, there remain seventeen lithographs, based on drawings of the mise en scène that Grosz edited in 1928, with Malik, in a folder entitled Hintergrund. Among these is the drawing that caused a scandal and led to a long court case where Grosz was found guilty of blasphemy.

It is called Maul halten un weiter dienen (Close Your Mouth and Do Your Duty), and shows Christ on the cross with a gas mask and soldiers’ boots. One of his hands, raised aloft despite his bindings, is holding a black cross. Between his head and the inscription INRI is a shining halo. You can see his ribs through his skeletal body and in his side is the bleeding lance wound. The extreme weakness of the dying figure is shown in his buckling knees, no longer able to bear the weight of his fragile body. I have always been haunted by this small drawing. It is both terribly irreverent but also a savage plea for good sense and rationality to emerge from these depths of neglect and shame, an unadorned testimony to human suffering, not an act of blasphemy. Grosz detested romanticism, and in this period he always stated that one should accept life in all its cruel reality, without idealising it. ‘My opinion is that one should always have the courage to face up to the senselessness of everything that happens. The only sense in the world is the sense that one gives it. That for me, with a few nuances, is the domain of my art,’ he wrote to Wieland Herzfelde on 6 June 1933,³⁶ a sentence that encapsulates his attitude towards art and life. But this picture shows how artistic creation cannot be controlled by reason alone, even in someone as reluctant to express ‘emotion’ as Grosz. For in that Christ in uniform, exposed to the horror of war in the trenches — the mud and mustard gas — who protests with the only thing that he has left to him— the human suffering inflicted on him by his killers — we see not just a provocative image but rather a moral allegory and a plea to society, to alienated men and women, to change direction. In the explosive conditions of extreme radicalisation that the Weimar Republic was experiencing in the final years of the decade, it would have been difficult for anyone to give such a pacifist and humanist reading of this Christ with his mask and boots, and it would not have been an interpretation that even Grosz would have accepted, because he was convinced that this was just another of his sacrilegious attacks on institutions and idols. That is perhaps the reason why, in 1930, he made a statue of this same image for an exhibition in Berlin organised by the IFA, the front organisation for the Communist Party. (The statue was confiscated by the police.) But, taken out of this radical context, this pathetic, alarming little figure has acquired an emotional and ethical resonance very different from how it was initially conceived. Something deeper and more permanent is now being expressed through it, with an energy and a subtlety that Grosz would only achieve on rare occasions.³⁷

Although he continued working occasionally with the Communist Party, Grosz had stopped being an activist in 1925, and for some time, albeit discreetly, he had voiced his contempt and scepticism for the ‘masses’ and had openly rejected all forms of ‘collectivism’. In his autobiography, he states that his disillusionment with communism and Marxism began with his visit to the USSR, where he spent six months in 1922. He was there to do a book with the Danish writer Martin Andersen-Nexo (who ended up writing it on his own). The journey was eventful, full of colourful incidents. Grosz met a very sick Lenin in the Kremlin, along with a number of figures from the Revolution, including Bujarin, Lunacharsky and Radek, and he heard Trotsky speak. Grosz was at one point drawn to Constructivism, the art form that looked to embrace modern technology and industry and replace man by machines (or turn man into a machine). Constructivism was all the rage in Moscow, and Grosz offers an amusing sketch of the extravagant Tatlin, the mentor of that school, whom he visited in his ramshackle house full of balalaikas and chickens. But the chaotic state of the country, the hunger, the arrogance of the commissars, the signs of authoritarianism — and perhaps above all, his intuition of the absolute control that would be exercised over all aspects of society as the state, in the hands of the Party, began to spread its tentacles — revealed to him another side of that revolution that he and his left-wing friends in Berlin had viewed with so much hope. And they showed him that, however many gains they might achieve, in communist societies there would never be a place for iconoclastic and uncontrollable people like him. This journey, without doubt, began the process that, as happened with Orwell, would lead him to become as radically opposed to communism as he was to fascism.

But this was a gradual and somewhat tortuous process; when he got back to Berlin, and in the years immediately following his visit, he did not make public his negative impressions of the USSR, perhaps to keep his distance from the violent anti-Soviet sentiments of the conservatives and the Nazis, who were becoming increasingly numerous in German society, that he would continue to attack with the same vehemence as before. He stayed another three years in the party and even became the president of the recently formed Rote Gruppe (Red Group) of the Communist Union of German Artists in 1924. He contributed posters and drawings to the electoral campaigns of the party and until the end of the decade, with some strained moments, he remained a loyal ‘travelling companion’. In 1925 he published with Wieland Herzfelde Die Kunst ist in Gefahr (Art is in Danger), a collection of essays close to the aesthetic line of the Communist Party. There he argued that ‘the artist cannot ignore the laws of social development, which is now the class struggle’, and that painters had no other option but to choose between ‘displaying technique and propaganda and class struggle’. Luckily, when he came to paint and draw, Grosz did not take any account of his own ideas in favour of this ‘tendentious art’ and continued to follow, above all, his own impulses and deeper instincts. His art was ‘tendentious’ to the highest degree, of course, and his vision of social reality was absolutely dogmatic and Manichaean, but it was also individualist and arbitrary in a way that was completely incompatible with the teachings and propaganda that the Communist Party expected of its artists. In one court of law where he was being tried, Grosz declared in 1928: ‘When I am creating a drawing, I am not interested in any laws’.³⁸ That’s true. Among these ‘laws’, of course, were his own political convictions. But when, in the intimacy of his studio in Sudende, these came up against his fantasy and his sense of unbridled freedom, it was fantasy and freedom that prevailed.

Some critics, including the well-informed Uwe M. Schneede, quote a letter that Grosz sent to his brother-in-law, Otto Schmalhausen, on 27 May 1927 as proof that his break with the revolution and the left could be due to financial considerations. ‘My plan (taking into account the advice of Flechtheim³⁹) is the following: to painting a series of ‘commercial’ landscapes, avoiding causing offence. If I sell them, then, in the winter, I’ll be able to work on my favourite themes.’ But this implied criticism is not born out by the facts. It was precisely his most pugnacious and virulent paintings and drawings that brought him prestige among the most enlightened sectors of Weimar Germany’s bourgeoisie and aristocracy, who, like the elites of other European societies in the mad years of the inter-war period, discovered the refined pleasure of being artistically insulted, ill-treated and scandalised by Dadaists, Surrealists and revolutionaries of all complexions, and subscribed to their magazines and theatres, bought their paintings and went along happily to their shows. If its financial fate had depended on the proletariat, then all this rich literature and this splendid iconoclastic art in Europe at the beginning of the century would have vanished without trace. From this despised elite came the buyers and also Grosz’s backers, like the generous Doctor Felix J. Weil and Count Harry Kessler who, even in his most revolutionary moments, continued to help him economically, paying for trips and giving him a monthly income. It was this ferocious and insulting Grosz that the clientele admired, not the docile painter of landscapes that he did indeed begin to work on at the end of the twenties.

The evolution or, perhaps, the involution that Grosz’s work experienced, and which would continue after his move to the United States, is too profound and complex to be interpreted as a simple mercenary calculation which would also have been completely counterproductive, and would have undermined his artistic prestige. In any event, the fact is that when in 1930 he published, not with his communist friend Wielan Herzfelde’s publishing house, Malik Verlag, but with Bruno Cassirer, the sixty drawings of the series Über alles die Liebe (Love above All Else), something had changed in his world, even though outwardly all seemed to be the same. In his brief introduction to this work, Grosz says: ‘The devil will know why, but when one looks at them up close, people and things become inadequate, ugly and often ambiguous and senseless.’ However, in the watercolours and drawings of this collection, the reverse is true; people and things have become beautiful and more concrete. The world has lost its mystery, and objects and human beings seem to occupy firm and stable places in a world that has become static.

There are no demonic priests, and the few soldiers that crop up are not malevolent but seem instead cheerfully ridiculous. The bourgeois has softened his manners, and ladies have become much more decorous: they now play tennis, and when they are in dance halls, in cafés, on walks and even in the bedroom, they no longer display their buttocks, their breasts and their vaginas to such an extent. As well as being more dressed than undressed, they are also less fat than before, and sometimes have slim bodies that show off to great effect the tailored coats and high-heeled shoes that are the dominant fashion of the day. Dandyism, hedonism, frivolity, snobbery and cunning have replaced the slashed throats, dismemberments, sadism, masochism and voyeurism. Politics and nightmares have disappeared, and sex, crime and assaults can only be glimpsed in the distance, remote grounds for muted fury and innocuous venom. There is a sense of general prosperity. Instead of cripples, beggars and unemployed people, the streets are full of friendly construction workers, and even the few remaining prostitutes, in their discreet brothels, are a bit like young society ladies. Instead of raping or killing them, gentlemen now kiss the ladies, sit them on their knees and talk to them like equals. Naughty old buffers spy on maids, as in popular farces. Evil, cruelty and violence have fled the fictive world of Grosz and their place has been taken by irony, humour, conformity, understanding and benevolence.

Just as his fictional world was transformed, so his life became radically different when he travelled to the United States. It was a childhood dream and a political necessity. He travelled just in time, since eighteen days after his departure, on 30 January, Hitler came to power. Few artists were as detested by the Nazis, and for good reason. In his last year in Berlin a group of brown shirts came to his studio in Berlin. He was saved by his acting ability: the thugs went away thinking that he was the butler. In the famous inquisitorial fire of 10 May 1933 at the gates of the University of Humboldt, the forty odd books that he illustrated as well as his own books became fuel for the flames. Five oils — including the portrait of Max Herman-Neisse — two watercolours and thirteen prints were included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition organised by Goebbels and exhibited throughout Germany to show how obscene, sacrilegious, anti-patriotic, pro-Jewish and pro-Bolshevik ‘modernist’ art was (and, indeed all these adjectives applied to Grosz). The regime’s attack on his work was systematic and savage. Max Pechstein calculates that 285 works by Grosz disappeared or were destroyed by the Nazis. In March 1938 they took away his German nationality and, as they had nothing left of him to attack, they seized his wife’s few possessions. Grosz had already decided that he would, ‘along with his citizenship, discard his German identity, as if it were an old coat’. (He says this in his autobiography.) That year, he was given US nationality.

Editor’s note. For reasons of space, we are not including the analysis of the years spent in the United States. In these years, according to Vargas Llosa, the world depicted in Grosz’s art, showed ‘good sense, intelligence and reason, and perhaps even goodness and generosity’.

A dogmatic vision has tragic consequences in politics, because dogmas restrict and distort human reality, which is always more subtle and complex than ideological schemata and Manichean world views. But such a vision can be a marvellous stimulus for creating a work of art, which is always a fiction, that is, a condensation of reality. When a schematic view of humanity — and here we think of Grosz in art and Brecht in literature — is expressed with great technical and formal skill, then it can become a powerful and persuasive reality, an alternative world to lived experience. And although it is a fraud, it can often impose itself on reality and become that reality. Grosz produced his best work when he hated and wounded without compunction, when he dreamed of crimes and the apocalypse, when he divided the world into devils — soldiers, priests, prostitutes, bureaucrats and capitalists — and saints — revolutionaries and workers — and expressed all this in seductive and deceitful images.

In the worlds of art and literature — the worlds of fiction — people sometimes discover that their own secret utopias have been expressed, their deepest cravings have to some degree been satisfied. I find this with Grosz, above all the Grosz of the Berlin years. To admire his work, I do not have to burden it with ethical and political considerations, or psychological readings, because although these aspects might well be important, they do not address the central issue: that Grosz used all of this material to construct his own world, based on his own creative egotism.

Great artistic works are always mysterious and complex, so it is always risky to gauge them in ideological, moral or political terms, although not to do so would be to avoid something that is also undeniable: that a work is not created and does not resonate in a void, but rather within history. Some works can be understood quite easily and thus lend themselves to different interpretations. Other works, like those of Grosz, are much less easy to read, which is why critics often seem uneasy with him. Some critics analyse his work purely in artistic terms, talking about form and colour and composition, ignoring the ferocious distortions and violence of his world. And those that merely explore the content are often loathe to accept that his images are contradictory, at once a violent attack on, but also a celebration of, a world with which — doubtless despite himself — he closely identified.

Grosz was not a ‘social artist’. He was a maudit. In today’s shifting and superficial definitions of art, all original works must be described as maudit, eccentric and marginal, and so the term seems rather meaningless. But this was certainly not the case when Baudelaire used the word. What I mean is that Grosz’s work is absolutely authentic, and expresses an unrestrained freedom. His fantasies stirred the bilge of society and the human heart, and his invention of reality has, over time, become more powerful and truthful than reality itself. When we talk of the ‘Berlin years’ today, we are not thinking of the years that Germany suffered and enjoyed, but rather the years that Grosz invented.

Berlin, March 1992

Two Friends

The famous Yellow House in Arles that Vincent Van Gogh hired, furnished and filled with his own paintings to receive his friend Paul Gauguin in the autumn of 1888, no longer exists. It disappeared in an Allied bombing raid on 25 June 1945, and on the site now is a modest hotel called the Terminus Van Gogh. The owner, an alert little old lady of eighty-four, has a photograph of the bombed house. She had witnessed the bombing raid, which almost cost her her life. The surrounding area has not changed much, however, and you can recognise straight away the house next door that appears in one of the Dutchman’s paintings.

The large, circular Place Lamartine is still there, as are the massive green plane trees by the Cavalry Gate, set into the wall of the old city. The Rhône probably hasn’t changed much either as it flows slowly and majestically a few yards from this terrace, flanking the Roman town. What has disappeared is the small police station — replaced by a Monoprix store — along with the brothel of Madame Virginie, known then as the Number One House of Tolerance, which, in those two months that they lived together, the friends visited two or three times a week, Van Gogh always to sleep with a girl called Rachel. The shabby street where the brothel was located has been dug up and replaced by a wide avenue. This was then a very poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of town, with beggars, prostitutes and cafés full of the dregs of humanity, but in the century or more that has gone by, the area has become gentrified and it is now the home of discreet and anodyne middle-class people.

The two months that Van Gogh and Gauguin spent here, between October and December 1888, are the most mysterious in their lives. The details of what really happened between the two friends in those eight weeks have escaped the stubborn investigation of hundreds of researchers and critics who, from the few objective facts, try to clarify the unknown, sometimes with rather wild hypotheses and fantasies. The letters of the two men are evasive about their time together, and when at the end of his life Gauguin referred to this period, in Avant et Après, some fifteen years had gone by, syphilis had wreaked havoc with his memory, and his testimony was suspect because he was trying at all costs to counter the rumours, which were then widespread in France, that he had been responsible for Van Gogh’s final collapse into madness. What we do know is that in this now phantom house, the two men dreamed, painted, argued and fought, and that the Dutchman was on the point of killing the Frenchman, whose trip to Arles he had waited for with the impatience and the hopes of a lover.

There are no hints of a homosexual relationship between the two, but the relationship was certainly passionate and very highly charged. Van Gogh had met Gauguin a few months earlier, in Paris, and was fascinated by the overwhelming personality of this artist-adventurer who had just returned from Panama and Martinique, with some paintings that were full of light and primitive life, like the life that he himself looked to lead so as to counterbalance ‘the decadence of the West’. So he asked his brother Theo to help him convince Gauguin to come with him to Provence. There, in that yellow house, they would establish a community of artists, and they would be the pioneers. Gauguin would be the director and new painters would come to join this brotherhood or commune, where everything would be shared, where they would live for beauty, and where private property and money would not exist. This utopia obsessed Van Gogh. At first, Gauguin was opposed to it and came to Arles reluctantly, lured by the economic incentives offered by Theo, because the truth was that he was very happy in Pont-Aven, in Brittany. This can be seen in the fact that in several of the sixteen paintings that he completed in Arles, his Arles inhabitants are wearing Breton clogs and caps. However, after the tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1888, it would be Gauguin and not Van Gogh who would dedicate the rest of his life to try to bring to fruition the Dutchman’s utopian dream, and would set off for Polynesia, a land that had fascinated Van Gogh when he read about it in a novel by Pierre Loti, Le Mariage de Loti, a novel that he made Gauguin read during his stay in Arles.

Was it his excessive obsequiousness and the extraordinary lengths to which Van Gogh went to make him feel comfortable and happy in Arles that turned Gauguin against his companion? It is quite possible that the rather hysterical effusiveness of the Dutchman began to get on his nerves and made him feel imprisoned. But he was also irritated by his messiness, and by the fact that he took more money than had been agreed out of the common kitty for his ‘hygienic activities’ (which is what he called his visits to Rachel). They had divided up the tasks. Gauguin cooked and Van Gogh did the shopping, but the cleaning, that they shared, always left much to be desired. There was one definite argument over the pointilliste Seurat; Van Gogh, who admired him, wanted to invite him to the Studio of the South, the name given to the utopian community, and Gauguin refused, because he hated the artist.

Their aesthetic differences were more theoretical than practical. Van Gogh declared himself an out-and-out realist and looked to set up his easel in the open air, so that he could paint natural scenes. Gauguin maintained that the true raw material of a creator was not reality but memory, and that one should look for inspiration not in the world outside but rather from within. This dispute, which apparently provoked tremendous arguments between the two friends, has been resolved over time: neither of them illustrated their theories in their paintings, which now appear to us, despite being so different, equally full of invention and imagination as well as being firmly rooted in reality. In the first few weeks that they lived together in Arles, the good weather allowed them to put into practice Van Gogh’s theories. They both installed themselves outside to paint the same topics: the Alyscamps countryside, the great Roman and palaeo-Christian necropolis, the gardens of the Hôtel-Dieu, the public hospital. But then torrential rains set in and they had to stay cooped up in the Yellow House, painting mainly with their imagination and from memory. Being cooped up like this because of the inclement weather — it was the windiest and wettest autumn in half a century — must have created an atmosphere of claustrophobia and extreme tension, which often translated into violent arguments. That was the time that Gauguin sketched the portrait of his friend painting sunflowers that left the Dutchman dumbfounded: ‘Yes, that’s me. But already mad.’

Was he? There’s no doubt that in the hazy world that we call madness, there is a place that cannot be precisely defined which corresponds to Van Gogh’s mental state that autumn, although the diagnoses of ‘epilepsy’ that doctors treating him first in Arles and later in Saint-Rémy came up with leave us somewhat perplexed and sceptical about the true nature of his illness. But it is a fact that when living with Gauguin, something that he had invested so much in, turned sour, this brought on a crisis that he would never get out of. It is a fact that the idea that his friend would leave before the date he had promised (a year) was unbearable for him. He moved heaven and earth to keep him in Arles, but this had the opposite effect on Gauguin, convincing him to leave as soon as possible. This is the context for the episode on the night before Christmas Eve, 1888, for which we have only the improbable testimony of Gauguin to rely on. An argument in the Café de la Gare, while they were having an absinthe, ended abruptly: the Dutchman threw his glass at his friend, who only just managed to take evasive action. The next day, Gauguin tells him that he is going to move into a hotel because, he says, if a similar incident happened again, he would be likely to react with equal violence and wring his neck. At nightfall, when he was walking through Victor Hugo Park, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned, and saw Van Gogh with an open razor in his hand. When Van Gogh saw that he had been discovered, he ran away. Gauguin spent the night in a neighbouring guest house. At seven in the morning, he went back to the Yellow House and found it surrounded by neighbours and police. The previous evening, after the incident in the park, Van Gogh had cut off part of his left ear and had taken it, wrapped in a newspaper, to Rachel at Madame Virginie’s. Then he returned to his room and fell asleep, in a pool of blood. Gauguin and the police took him to the Hôtel-Dieu, and Gauguin left for Paris that same night.

Although they never saw one another again, in the months that followed, while Van Gogh spent an entire year at a clinic in Saint-Rémy, the friends from Arles exchanged several letters, in which the episode of the mutilation of the ear and their time in Arles are conspicuous by their absence. When Van Gogh committed suicide a year and a half later, in Auvers-sur-Oise, putting a bullet into his stomach, Gauguin made a very short and edgy comment, as if the whole matter was something far removed from him (‘It was fortunate for him, in terms of his suffering’). And subsequently, in the years that followed, he would avoid talking about the Dutchman, as if he always felt uneasy about the topic. However, it is clear that he did not forget him, and that his absence was very present in the fifteen remaining years of his life, perhaps in ways that he was not even always conscious of. Why else, if not, did he attempt to sow sunflowers, in front of his cabin in Punaauia, in Tahiti, even when everybody assured him that this exotic flower could never acclimatise to Polynesia? But the ‘savage Peruvian’, as he like to call himself, was stubborn, asked his friend Daniel de Monfreid for seeds, and worked the land so persistently that finally his indigenous neighbours and the missionaries of that remote place, Punaauia, could enjoy those strange yellow flowers that followed the movement of the sun.

All this happened more than a century ago, sufficient distance for the story to become enriched by the fantasies and lies that all human beings, not just novelists, are prone to. The friendly octogenarian who presides over the small Hôtel Terminus-Van Gogh, in the Place Lamartine, with whom I got on really well in the half an hour that she sat on this sunny terrace, told me, for example, some delightful inaccuracies about the Yellow House, that I pretended to believe completely. Suddenly, as a homage to those two friends who ennobled this piece of land, I decided to drink an absinthe. I had never before tried this drink that has such an illustrious Romantic, symbolist and modernista ancestry, the drink that Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rubén Darío drowned in, and which Van Gogh and Gauguin imbibed like water. I had imagined it as an exotic, aristocratic spirit, a green viscous colour, which would have a dramatic effect on me, but I was brought instead a rather plebeian pastis. The horrible drink smelt of pharmaceutically prepared mint and sugar and, when I rather unwisely forced it down me, I started retching. Yet one further proof that dull reality will never live up to our dreams and fantasies.

Arles, June 2001

Traces of Gauguin

The Marquesas are the most isolated islands — the furthest from a continent — of all the islands floating in the seas of the world. To get to Hiva Oa, you have to fly first to Tahiti (twenty-four hours from Europe and twelve from the American continent) and then, in Papeete, get into a tiny plane that is buffeted for about four hours by stormy clouds, and finally, after a stop in Niku Hiva, you land in Atuona. The landscape is magnificent: soaring mountainsides and peaks covered in green, rising out of a rough sea, with great foaming waves which seem to be battering Hiva Oa, intent on destroying it.

Atuona, the capital of the island, is now even smaller than in Gauguin’s time. Now it has less than a thousand inhabitants and, in 1901, when he stepped on shore, there were two hundred more people. It is still a single small street that leads from Traitor’s Bay two-thirds of a mile to the slopes of the imperious Mount Temétiu. In some parts you need a lot of imagination to follow Gauguin’s travels in Tahiti: Papeete and Punaauia are now modern and prosperous and overrun by tourists. In Atuona, by contrast, the traces of the last two years of his life that he spent here are everywhere to be seen. The landscape, of course, has barely changed. The town, which has some new houses but has lost a lot of the old buildings, is still a small human settlement engulfed by nature, which seems to have kept it apart from time and the trappings of the modern world. In Atuona, it isn’t the clocks but rather the cock crowing that wakes up the inhabitants, and life still continues in slow motion, in a warm and happy lethargy.

Mr Maitiki, who gave Gauguin lodgings in his first weeks on the island, is buried in the Make Make cemetery, not far from his grave, and his descendants are still involved in trade, as he was. A great-grandson of Monsieur Frébault, who was there at his death, is the president of the Friends of Gauguin Society, and he acts as my guide. He’s an athletic islander, and his body is covered with the fine tattoos that, from time immemorial, the islands have been famous for, and which was one of the attractions that drew Gauguin here. But Gauguin, alas, could hardly see those delicate tattoos because of the calamitous state of his eyes — as well as lacerating his legs and damaging his heart and brain, syphilis had greatly affected his eyesight in his final years — and because the implacable Bishop Martin, his mortal enemy, who was bent on Westernising the Kanakas and the Maori, had banned them. Now the bones of Monseigneur Martin and Koke (the name given to Gauguin by the local people) rest a few yards from each other in the heights of Atuona, facing the open seas that brought in whaling ships to press-gang local Indians as crew members, and also terrifying tsunamis that devastated Atuona on several occasions in the nineteenth century.

There’s no trace left of Ben Varney, the storekeeper, who was a very close friend of Gauguin and possibly went back to die in his homeland, the United States. But the store is still there, almost intact, a two-storey building with wooden railings and a corrugated iron roof, where Koke came to buy the little that he ate and the great deal that he drank, absinthe for him and his friends, and rum for the indigenous people that Monseigneur Martin had forbidden to drink alcohol. Gauguin fought against this prohibition, leaving outside the door of his house — la Maison de Jouir — a small barrel of rum for all the local people to help themselves.

His dear friend and neighbour Tioka, with whom he exchanged names — a Marquesa custom signifying brotherhood and reciprocity — died here, and although his house no longer stands, his family house does, identical to the dwellings that wealthy townspeople built in Atuona in those days. It’s on the other side of the stream where Gauguin used to bathe naked, an act which scandalised the neighbouring missionaries and nuns and outraged the local policeman Claverie, who would have put him in prison — this was his dream — if Gauguin had not died beforehand. Gauguin’s house no longer exists — the House of Pleasure has been rebuilt in another place — but the former site has been identified thanks to the well that the painter helped to dig out with his own hands. This was the house that the girls from the nearby Santa Ana College came to in secret when the Cluny nuns were not keeping an eye on them. The college has grown since then, but it still has a very pretty garden full of bougainvilleas, mangoes and coconut palms, and a myriad laughing and talkative young girls who are not put off at all by the presence of an outsider. When I mention Gauguin, the friendly Mother Superior blushes and changes the subject. Those wilful little girls ignored the ban and went to look around the house of this corrupting devil and see the pornographic postcards that were up on his walls: forty-five exactly, showing every imaginable position, which he had bought in Port Said on a stopover on the boat journey that brought Gauguin to Polynesia.

His sexual exploits, which his biographers have fantasised over at length, were a thing of the past when Gauguin arrived in Atuona. His precarious health did not permit too many excesses. It’s true that he bought a girl, his vahiné, Vaeoho, from an indigenous family in the Hekeani Valley. The family asked for a number of goods in exchange for her, that he had to buy on credit from the shopkeeper Ben Varney. Vaeoho gave him a child, whose descendants, spread throughout Hiva Oa, now flee from journalists and critics as if they had the plague (they’re surely right to do so). However, this marriage did not last long because as soon as she knew she was pregnant Vaeoho, who found his legs revolting, left him. Apart from a bit of more or less harmless dabbling with the girls from the mission who visited him, and an adventure with the red-haired Tohotaua, who was a model for his final paintings, it is inconceivable that, given his physical and mental condition when he reached the Marquesas Islands, he could have indulged in the same excessive behaviour as in Tahiti or in France. On Atuona, the only excesses open to this human wreck were in his imagination. And he did not hesitate in using this imagination to develop impossible projects: delirious religious essays arguing a so-called revolutionary interpretation of anti-Catholic Christianity, and political-judicial campaigns to exempt the indigenous people who lived far from Atuona from the obligation of sending their children to the school, to lift the ban on their purchasing alcohol and to exempt them from paying a road-building tax with the impeccable argument that the state had never built on the island of Hiva Oa one single yard of road (a fact that remains true today, one hundred years later). It was these manifestations of rebellion against colonial society that allowed his enemies — the church and the police — to enmesh him in a court case that he lost, a judgement that would have led not just to him losing his house and his few belongings, but also to a term of imprisonment, had his heart not stopped at an opportune moment.

In Tahiti, although there is an official cult to his memory and his work, many Tahitians put in a number of provisos when they talk about him. His behaviour towards native women was, who could deny it, abusive and sometimes brutal, and some people still repeat that as well as being a paedophile — he liked girls, young girls of thirteen or fourteen — he gave syphilis to many of his lovers. And, besides, could one speak of him as a Tahitian painter? I hasten to agree with them: the Tahiti of his paintings is much more a product of his fantasy and his dreams than of the real model. But is that not a point in his favour, the best way to show his credentials as a creator? Here on the Marquesas Islands, by contrast, I have not found in any conversation the slightest reticence among the native inhabitants in expressing their appreciation and admiration for Koke. Quite the reverse. Everyone knows who he was, what he did, where he is buried, and they tell stories that reveal a warm and friendly attitude towards him, a sense of kinship. Perhaps it isn’t Gauguin at all, but rather the way that the Marquesas people have of understanding and dealing with their fellow men and women: by opening their arms and their heart to them. And wasn’t it this, precisely, that Gauguin came looking for here, in the last journey of his incessant life? He spoke of primitive and intense civilisations, as yet uncorrupted by the abuse of reason and ecclesiastical laws, where beauty would not be a monopoly of artists, critics and collectors but rather a natural manifestation of human life, a shared state of mind, a universal religion. But, probably, behind these big words and schematic generalisations, there lay something much more simple and elusive: a society where happiness was possible. A society where one could live in peace and not in a state of permanent nervousness, without having to struggle for food, money and success, where one could concentrate on one’s vocation and not all the everyday worries that get in the way of this vocation. Paradise is not of this world and those who set out to look for it or construct it here are irremediably condemned to failure. But it is likely that out of all the places in the world that he went to look for it, Gauguin had never been so close to reaching that shimmering mirage that he had pursued all his life, as in this place where he arrived already half dead, where, in truth, he had come not to live but to die. It is enough to feel the gentle warmth that bathes Hiva Oa, and to look out on its mountain slopes or its rough seas, and listen to the melody with which the native people sing their words, and see them walk with a dance in their steps, unhurriedly and with supernatural grace, to feel that, despite everything, Koke, the wretched dreamer, was not completely on the wrong track when he came here in pursuit of his unrealisable dream.

Atuona, January 2001

The Men-Women of the Pacific

When Gauguin arrived in Tahiti for the first time, in June 1891, he had his hair down to his shoulders, wore a cockade with red fur, and his clothes were flamboyant and provocative. He had dressed like this ever since he had given up his career on the Stock Exchange in Paris. The indigenous people of Papeete were surprised at his appearance and believed he was a mahu, a rare species among the Europeans in Polynesia. The colonists explained to the painter that, in the Maori tongue, the mahu was a man-woman, a type that had existed from time immemorial in the cultures of the Pacific, but which had been demonised and banned by common consent by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, engaged in a fierce battle to indoctrinate the native peoples, during the intense period of colonisation in the mid-nineteenth century.

However, it proved well-nigh impossible to root out the mahu from indigenous society. Concealed in urban settlements, the mahu survived in the villages and even in the cities, and re-emerged when official hostility and persecution abated. Proof of this fact can be found in Gauguin’s paintings in the nine years that he spent in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, which are full of human beings of uncertain gender who share equally masculine and feminine attributes with a naturalness and openness that is similar to the way in which his characters display their nakedness, merge with the natural order or indulge in leisure.

In his book of fantasised memoirs, Noa Noa, Gauguin relates a quasi-homosexual experience that he said inspired his painting Pape Moe (Mysterious Waters), in which an androgynous young person is bending over to drink from a forest waterfall. In fact, Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings would be very different and would seem much more arbitrary, without the strong presence of the mahu in the indigenous community that he was so close to. They are the raw material, the secret root, of his women with their solid thighs and broad shoulders, who stand firmly on the ground, and of his effeminate young men, in languid poses who seem to exhibit themselves as they stretch out to pick fruit from the trees, and who adorn their long hair with diadems of flowers. It is true that he invented these unmistakable characters; but he based them on a human reality about which, curiously for a man so loquacious on other topics, he always maintained a stubborn reserve.

It is risky to translate mahu as homosexual because, even in the most permissive societies of our age, homosexuality is still surrounded by prejudice and discrimination. Such prejudices did not exist among the Polynesians before the emissaries of Christian Europe censored a practice that, before their arrival, was recognised and universally respected and accepted as a legitimate variant of human diversity. The extraordinary sexual freedom of the Maoris of the islands has been the subject of countless studies, testimonies and caricatures ever since the first European ships reached these islands of paradisiacal beauty. Only now that Western society has gradually made sufficient advances to allow a similar sexual freedom and tolerance to that enjoyed by Polynesian cultures can we realise how civilised and lucid these small Pacific Maori communities were, at a time when the powerful West was still mired in the savagery of prejudice and intolerance. It was not just a question of sexual freedom; there was also a widespread practice among native communities of adopting orphaned or abandoned children, a custom that is still maintained. (Mr Tetuani of Mataiea, where Gauguin lived for several months, had twenty-five adopted children.)

The mahu might be a practising homosexual or remain chaste, like a girl making a vow of chastity. What defines them is not how or with whom they make love, but that, having been born with the sexual organs of a man, they have opted for femininity, usually from childhood, and that, helped by their family and community, they have become women, in their way of dressing, walking, talking, singing, working and often, but clearly not necessarily, of making love.

One of the reasons why, despite the prohibitions of the Churches, the mahus survived in Maori society during the nineteenth century was that they could count on the hidden complicity of the European colonists. They hired mahus to work as domestic servants — cooks, childminders, launderers, etc. — because for these household tasks the mahus were generally competent and, according to public opinion, ‘irreplaceable’. But in certain dances, songs and public ceremonies the mahus were also indispensable, because some songs, dances and performances are strictly for them, traditional expressions of what we might call that third sex, that are markedly different from male and female expressions.

Is it true that today, unlike what happened in traditional Polynesian society, ninety per cent of mahus are of humble origin, and that there is something like a relationship of cause and effect between the mahu and the poorest and most marginal sectors of indigenous society? (I hasten to add the proviso that ‘poverty’ and ‘marginality’ are concepts that, in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, bear little relationship to the extremes of injustice and inhumanity that these words express, for example, in Latin America). It must be the case, since I was given the information by a sociologist from the University of Papeete, who has studied Maori society for many years. He also told me that whereas in the past it was often the case that if a family had a number of boys, their own parents would decide to educate one of the boys as a girl, today nobody is a mahu through parental imposition, but through their own free choice.

In any event, even though the majority of the mahus are of humble origin, there are a number among the native middle classes of the islands. I have seen them, for example, in university lecture halls, mingling with the other students, as customers or employees in restaurants and cafés, and in the Protestant and Catholic services on Sundays, dressed up in beautiful clothes and headgear, without attracting any impertinent glances apart from mine.

I confess my admiration for the absolute normality with which I have seen the mahus move around, from the streets, hotels and offices of modern Papeete to remote rural areas in Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa, or on the Marquesas. The cook in the hotel I stayed in on Atuona was a mahu called Teriki who told me that she had realised around eleven or twelve that she wanted to be a woman. Her parents did not place any obstacles in her way; quite the reverse, they helped her from the outset, dressing her as a woman. She assured me that she has never been ill-treated or ridiculed by anyone on Atuona, where she and the other mahus — ten per cent of the male population, she assures me — lead a normal life. It’s true that they had some difficulties at first with the friendly Father Labró of the Catholic mission, but Teriki and other mahus on the island explained their case at length, and from then on ‘the parish priest accepted us’.

However, a curious character that I got to know on Papeete, called Cerdan Claude, assured me that, contrary to appearances and the evidence of my own eyes, the mahus were not widely accepted in Polynesian society. According to him, modernity has also brought machismo and homophobia to Polynesia, above all at night, when it was not unusual to find gangs of thugs bursting into the prostitute district around the port of Papeete looking for mahus to harass and beat up. Cerdan Claude is sixty, and is gaunt and mysterious like a character out of Conrad. He was born in a Foreign Legion camp in Algeria, but he has never been a legionnaire. He has travelled the world, was once a boxer, has spent more than thirty years in Tahiti and now writes novels. His latest is a documentary novel on the world of the rae rae, a word that I thought synonymous with mahu, but he assures me that between the two terms there is a ‘metaphysical distance’. His long explanation of the difference leaves me confused. I finally deduce that while the mahu is the man-woman with traditional roots in Polynesian society, the Tahitian rae rae is its modern, urban expression, having more in common with the snipped and tucked drag queens of the West, with their hormone and silicone injections, than with the delicate cultural, psychological and social re-creation that is the mahu of Maori tradition. The mahu is an integral part of society, while the rae rae lives on its margins. Cerdan Claude seems to know very well the nocturnal world of prostitution inhabited by the rae rae, a world in which he moves freely; he adopts a beneficent, rather paternal attitude towards them. They tell him about their sorrows and desires and he gives them advice on how ‘to deal with the problems of life’: he says it with such conviction that I believe him.

The ‘Piano Bar’ in Papeete, where Cerdan Claude takes me one night, is an enormous, smoky discotheque, where the rae rae and heterosexual couples socialise in perfect harmony. They mingle all the time. It is not easy to detect the borders that separate the sexes — my impression is that very little or nothing separates them — at least to my layman’s eye. Cerdan Claude, by contrast, has a very sharp eye, and knows everyone by name. The rae rae come, one after the other, to greet him and kiss him on the cheek, and he receives them like a kindly grandfather. He introduces me to everyone and encourages them to talk to me about their lives and have their photograph taken by my daughter Morgana, something which they are delighted to do, brimming over with good humour and childish curiosity. Anne, the son of a New Zealand man and a Tahitian woman, is a beautiful, willowy girl who, she says, had difficulties with her parents when, as a boy, she started to dress as a girl. But now she gets on very well with them and they do not object to her sexual orientation. It is difficult to imagine that this smiling young woman was once a man. But she was, and still is, in part, as she tells me with great charm and no hint of vulgarity. She has been under the surgeon’s knife, which retouched her nose and implanted the upright breasts that she displays, but she has still to replace her phallus and testicles with an artificial vagina, because the operation is very expensive. She is saving and she will have it done. She had just spent a couple of years in Paris, where she got some good modelling jobs, but the violence in the city — where, one night, an Arab threatened her with a knife — and the cold made her return to warm and peaceful Polynesia. When she leaves us, the boys at the ‘Piano Bar’ swarm around her like flies, asking her to dance. I heard her utter this patriotic phrase, the most surprising of the night and perhaps of my entire rapid visit to Tahiti: ‘It’s a thousand times better to be a prostitute in Papeete than a model in Paris.’

Papeete, January 2002

The Painter in the Brothel

Jean-Jacques Lebel, a writer and avant-garde artist who used to organise ‘happenings’ in the sixties, had the very daring idea back then to stage ‘with absolute fidelity’, Desire Caught by the Tail, a delirious theatre piece written by Picasso in 1941 in which, among other crazy things, a female character, La Tarte, urinates on stage for ten consecutive minutes, squatting over the prompter’s booth. (To achieve this effect, Lebel informs us, the liquefying actress had to drinks pints of tea and great infusions of cherries.) He talked to the painter at the beginning of 1966 about the project and Picasso showed him a whole raft of erotic drawings and paintings, from his Barcelona period, that he had never exhibited. From that moment Lebel decided that one day he would organise an exhibition that would show, without any euphemisms or censorship, the power of sex in Picasso’s world. This idea has finally become a reality, almost four decades later, in a vast exhibition of 330 works, many of them never exhibited before, in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, where it will stay until the end of May, before moving on to Montreal and Barcelona.

The first question to ask, after going round this exciting exhibition (never has that adjective been more appropriate), is why it has taken so long to organise. There have been innumerable exhibitions on the work of this artist, whose influence can be found in every branch of modern art, but, until now, nothing specific on the theme of sex which, as this exhibition curated by Lebel and Gérard Régnier so very clearly demonstrates, obsessed the painter in a very productive way. Especially at certain extreme moments in his life — in his youth and old age — he experimented and expressed himself in this area with remarkable confidence and daring, in drawings, sketches, objects, engravings and canvases that, despite their unequal artistic value, reveal his most secret and intimate motivations — his desires and erotic fantasies — and throw a new light on the rest of his work.

‘Art and sexuality are the same thing,’ Picasso said to Jean Leymarie and, on another occasion, he pointed out that ‘there is no such thing as chaste art’. Perhaps such remarks might not be true for all artists, but they are quite clearly appropriate for him. Why, then, did Picasso himself help to hide for quite a long time this aspect of his artistic production, that is a constant in his work, even though at times he chose to keep it a secret? For ideological and commercial reasons, says Jean-Jacques Lebel in an interesting interview with Geneviève Breerette. During his Stalinist period, when he painted the portrait of Stalin and denounced the ‘massacres in Korea’, eroticism would have been a source of conflict between Picasso and the Communist Party, to which he was affiliated, which espoused the aesthetic orthodoxy of socialist realism, in which there was no room for the ‘decadent’ celebration of sexual pleasure. And late, following the advice of his marchands, he admitted that he kept this aspect of his work hidden for fear of offending the puritanism of US collectors, thus cutting off this lucrative market. These are human weaknesses that geniuses are not exempt from, as we know.

In any event, it is now possible to consider every facet of Picasso’s work, a universe with so many constellations that it makes us giddy. How could one hand, the imagination of a single mortal, produce such extraordinary creativity? There is no reply to this question; Picasso leaves us speechless, as do Rubens, Mozart or Balzac. The development of his work, with its distinctive stages, themes, forms and motifs, is a journey through all the schools and artistic movements of the twentieth century, which he learned from and to which he contributed in his own completely distinctive way. Then he looked to the past, bringing that past back into the present in a number of very finely observed re-creations, caricatures and rereadings that showed just how contemporary and fresh the Old Masters were. But sex is never absent, in all the periods that critics have divided and organised Picasso’s work, even in the Cubist years. Sometimes it is a discreet, symbolic reference, working through allusion. At other times it is insolently open and crude, in images that seem to challenge the conventions of eroticism, refinement and the chaste ways that art has traditionally described physical love, to make it compatible with established morality.

The sex that Picasso reveals in most of these works, especially in the years of his youth in Barcelona, is elemental, not sublimated by the rituals and baroque ceremonies of a culture that disguises, civilises and turns animal instinct into works of art, a sex that wants desire immediately satisfied, without delay, subterfuge, fuss or distractions. Sex for the hungry and the orthodox, not sex for dreamers or refined people. That is why it is a completely macho sexual outlook, where there is no male homosexuality and where lesbianism is just there for the pleasure of the male onlooker. Sex for men, primitive, rough, where the phallus is king. Women are there to serve, to not have pleasure themselves, but to give pleasure, to open their legs and submit to the whims of the fornicating male. They are often depicted kneeling, engaged in fellatio, which could be seen as an archetypal image of this sexual order: the woman gives pleasure but also yields to and adores the all-powerful macho. The phallus, these images proclaim, is above all else power.

It is natural that the privileged location for this sort of pleasure is the brothel. There are no sentimental distractions in the way of this drive that looks to sate an urgent need and then forget about it and go on to something else. In the brothel, where sex is bought and sold, where there are no entanglements and no excuses or alibis are necessary, sex is revealed in all its naked truth, as pure present, as an intense and shameless spectacle which does not linger in the memory, pure and fleeting copulation, immune to remorse and nostalgia.

The repeated images of this brothel sex, its vulgarity and lack of imagination, that fill so many notebooks, cards and canvases, would be monotonous without the cheerful touches that we find, jokes and exaggerations that show a state of mind brimming over with enthusiasm and happiness. A humanised fish — a mackerel! — is licking a young woman who is compliant but bored to death. And in all this work, even the rapid sketches he did in the middle of some party, on serviettes, menus and newspaper cuttings, to please a friend or to record a meeting, there is evidence of his extraordinary craft, that piercing gaze that can set down in a few essential brushstrokes the mad vortex of reality. The apotheosis of the brothel in Picasso’s work is, of course, Les demoiselles d’Avignon, which is not in this exhibition, although many of the first sketches and drafts of this masterpiece are here.

With the passing of the years, the rough sexual edges of youth were smoothed out, and desire began to be expressed in mythological characters. All the Minotaurs painted in the thirties gleam with vigorous sensuality, with a sexual power that displays its bestiality with grace and shamelessness, as a proof of life and artistic creativity. By contrast, in the beautiful series of prints dedicated to Rafael and Fornarina from the late sixties, the loving interaction between the painter and his model under the lascivious gaze of an old pontiff who is resting his flaccid limbs on a chamber pot, is imbued with a deep sadness. What is represented here is not just the joyful physical love of the young people, the voluptuousness that is part of artistic endeavour. There is also the melancholy of the observer, who, with the passing of the years, is no longer competing in the jousts of love, an ex-combatant who must resign himself to enjoy looking at other people’s enjoyment, while he feels life slipping away. And that the death of his sexual drive will soon be followed by the other, the definitive death. This theme is recurrent in the final years of Picasso’s life, and the exhibition in the Jeu de Paume has a number of pictures in which this inconsolable nostalgia for a lost virility appears with a wrenching insistence, the bitterness of knowing that the fateful wheel of time no longer allows one to bathe in the source of life, to experience that explosion of pure pleasure in which human beings glimpse immortality and which the French ironically call ‘the little death’. Figurative death and real death, orgasm and physical extinction, are the protagonists of the dramatic painting that Picasso kept on producing almost until the final death rattle.

Paris, March 2001

When Paris Was a Fiesta

It is not an exaggeration to say that I spent the whole of my adolescence dreaming of Paris. I lived then in the claustrophobic world of Lima in the fifties, convinced that it was impossible to become a writer or an artist without knowing Paris, because the capital of France was also the universal capital of thought and the arts, the centre that conveyed to the rest of the world new ideas, new forms and styles, the experiments and issues that would do away with the past and lay the foundations of what would become the culture of the future.

Given the poverty of literature and the arts in present-day France, those beliefs might now seem rather stupid, the naïveté of a provincial and underdeveloped young man, seduced at a distance by the romantic myth of Paris. But the truth is that the myth was still very close to the reality in 1959, when, in a trance, I finally began my stay in Paris, which would last for almost seven years. The great intellectual figures whose ideas and works reverberate throughout almost the entire world were still alive, and many of them at the height of their creativity, from Sartre to Camus, from Malraux to Céline, from Breton to Aragon, from Mauriac to Raymond Aron, from Foucault to Goldmann, and from Bataille to Ionesco and Beckett. The list is a long one. It is true that the nouveau roman of Claude Simon, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and company that was in vogue at the time, passed like a will-o’-the-wisp, without leaving many traces, but that movement was just one among many, like the Tel Quel group, organised under the influence of the brilliant sophist Roland Barthes, one of whose university courses I took at the Sorbonne, with a mixture of fascination and irritation. Barthes listened to himself talking, as spellbound by his own words as we, his audience, were, and his lectures were a mixture of massive erudition and intellectual frivolity.

I don’t know whether in the sixties Paris was still the capital of culture. But to judge by the magnificent exhibition at the Royal Academy in London entitled ‘Paris, Capital of the Arts 1900–1968’, it certainly was, at least in this sense: no other capital in the world had the same ability to attract and assimilate so much artistic talent from all parts of the world. Along with the Romanians Cioran and Ionesco, the Greek Castoriadis, or the Swiss Jean-Luc Godard, innumerable musicians, filmmakers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, painters and writers left their own countries, of necessity or by their own free will, and took up residence in Paris. Why? For the same reasons as those expressed by the Chilean Acario Copota, who considered that for any writer in the making, it was essential to take ‘a breather in Paris’. Because, apart from the stimulating atmosphere of creativity and freedom, Paris was, culturally speaking, an open city, hospitable to foreigners, where talent and originality were welcomed and adopted with enthusiasm, regardless of origin.

One of the most instructive aspects of the Royal Academy exhibition is to see how, throughout the twentieth century, the most fertile and novel tendencies in art in Europe and many parts of the Western world — above all in the United States and Japan — passed through Paris or found in France the recognition and encouragement to establish themselves on the world stage. This happened with Picasso, Miró and Juan Gris; with Mondrian and Giorgio di Chirico; with Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Stravinsky; with Brancusi, Beckmann and Max Ernst; with Giacometti, Henry Miller and César Vallejo; with Huidobro, Gino Severini and Isadora Duncan; with Chagal, Lipchitz, Calder and Foujita; with Van Dougen, Diego Rivera, Kupka and Natalia Goncharova; with Lam, Matta and Josephine Baker; with Modigliani and Man Ray; with Julio González, Torres García, Naum Gabo and hundreds, thousands, more. Perhaps it would be fanciful to say that all this extraordinary burgeoning of talent was the creation of what another lover of Paris, Rubén Darío, called the ‘face of Lutetia’. But that is not to say that the atmosphere and cultural dynamism of the City of Light itself did not contribute decisively to the full development of their creative potential.

In Paris one felt at home, because Paris was a home for all. And French culture was what it was because it did not belong only to Paris, but to the whole world; or rather it belonged to those who, seduced by its richness, generosity, variety and universality, made it their own, as I did as an adolescent in Lima, when I rushed to the Alliance Française to read in the original the authors that had dazzled me. And, in turn, one could see in the galleries of the Royal Academy that the open-door policy towards ‘foreigners’ had the very positive result of incorporating their inventiveness, daring, insolence and radicalism into French culture. From post-Impressionism to ‘happenings’, including Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and all the avant-garde movements, in the field of art Paris is a Borgesian aleph, a microcosm that reflects the whole cosmos, the place that attracted or initiated the most influential cultural and artistic practices of the century.

How could it have happened that this international capital of the arts, the land that was open to the world and attracted artists from all over the world, could have declined so rapidly, and succumbed to a ridiculous, chauvinist provincialism, that, in a picturesque alliance between the far right and the far left, frenetically reclaims ‘cultural exceptionalism’ as a way of preventing foreign (for foreign read American) artistic products from staining the sacrosanct ‘cultural identity’ of France?

I read the answer to this question that had been plaguing me ever since I left the Royal Academy in low spirits, in a luminous article entitled ‘Cultural Extinction’ written by Jean-François Revel. The text, written with his usual sparkling irony and devastating intelligence, demolishes the arguments in favour of cultural protectionism with irrefutable examples. To defend oneself against foreign influences, he says, is not the best way to preserve one’s own culture; it is, rather, the best way to kill it. And he compares the example of Athens, an open city, where arts, letters, philosophy and mathematics circulated freely, with that of Sparta, which jealously guarded its exceptionalism and which achieved ‘the feat of being the only Greek city not to produce a single poet, orator, thinker or architect’. Sparta defended its culture so successfully that that culture became extinct.

Revel also reminds us that cultural nationalism, a thesis normally propounded by ignorant people who see culture simply as an instrument of power and political propaganda, is profoundly anti-democratic, a grotesque scenario characteristic of totalitarian regimes. These regimes have always put fences around cultural life and subjected it to the control and the beneficence of the state. For that reason, cultural nationalism is inapplicable to an open society, which means that, despite all the noise and periodic campaigns in support, it will find it difficult to prosper in France so long as French society continues to be democratic, which it will doubtless remain for the foreseeable future. Because the only way in which cultural protectionism can translate into an effective policy is through a rigorous system of discrimination and censure against cultural products, something that would be intolerable for an adult, modern and free society.

What would have happened, asks Revel, if, instead of inviting Italian painters to Paris, the French kings in the sixteenth century had thrown them out, in defence of ‘national identity’? And what of the enormously fertile influence of Spanish literature in France in the sixteenth century, even when the two countries were at war?

If France had not traditionally opened its borders to ‘foreign products’, there could never have been an exhibition like this in the Royal Academy, which is an involuntary manifesto in favour of the free circulation of art and artists throughout the entire world, with no barriers in place. And without this openness, France would never have managed to excite so many young people the world over, like me in Lima in the fifties, with the idea that there, in that splendid, distant land, beauty and genius were cultivated in greater measure than in other parts, as was demonstrated by those poets and writers who spoke to us with a voice so clear and strong that it reached even the furthest corners where we felt isolated, and those artists, filmmakers and musicians whose works seemed to be pitched exactly to satisfy our most demanding desires and dreams.

One of the reasons put forward by the avid defenders of cultural protectionism — greedy, of course, for state subsidies — is that without this nationalist policy towards culture in France, it would go into irremediable decline. My impression is precisely the reverse. It is only because French culture is barely a shadow of what it used to be that, in France, the aberrant idea that culture needs customs houses, borders and stipends — a bureaucratic hothouse — to survive, has managed to gain credence.

London, March 2002

Botero at the Bullfight

The premiere of Blood and Sand with Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the mid-fifties, was a major event in my life. I saw the film seven times, in the morning and matinée screenings in the Acha Cinema, and from that moment on, for many years I dreamed of becoming a bullfighter. This desire had surfaced in my imagination ever since my uncle had taken me to my first bullfight, in the small ring in Cochabamba, yet it was not the real bullfight, but rather the one imagined by Blasco Ibáñez and Hollywood that turned this desire into a desperate need.

Was this childhood bullfighting obsession part of a generational epidemic spreading throughout Latin America? Because at the time when I was fighting Bolivian tricycles, a few thousand kilometres away, in another provincial city in the Andes, the green and winding Medellín, Fernando Botero enrolled in a bullfighting school and, for two years, took classes to train as a matador. His uncle Joaquín, a fanatical bullfighting aficionado, took him to the school, just as he had taken him along to see many fights with mature and novice bulls in the brand-new Macarena bullring and in the surrounding mountain towns, at a time when he had not even begun to dream about becoming a painter. The spectacle, the excitement, the colour, the indescribable blend of primitive savagery and exquisite refinement of these bullfights would become firmly lodged in his memory from that time on.

This is why it is not surprising that the first drawings Botero produced in the Jesuit College in Medellín were sketches of bulls. And it is perhaps a premonition that his first more or less personal work is a watercolour of a bull. We will never know, of course, if his defection from the bloody ceremonies of the bullfight in favour of the more gentle ceremonies of brush and easel, was a tragedy or a fortunate escape for the art of Manolete and Belmonte. But there is no doubt that it was a happy moment for the art of Goya and Velázquez. Furthermore, over the years, the skilled brushes of this artist would provide the most enthusiastic and complete homage to bullfighting of any modern painter (and I am not forgetting all the marvellous work that Picasso produced).

Although it was a central experience of his childhood and a significant presence in his early artistic expression, this theme — the bullfight — seems largely to disappear from his painting until the eighties. Botero remained a fan and went to all the fights he could, but bulls and bullfighters are not the subjects he treats in the difficult years of his childhood, when the Mexican muralists were his models, or in later years, when he carefully studied the classics in Spain, France and, above all, Italy. They crop up on occasion, but as furtive shadows, after that providential afternoon in 1956, in a park in Mexico, when, while he was doodling, he inflated the mandolin that he was drawing and suddenly discovered, miraculously, the sumptuous secret world of opulence in this object, and also his painting method. In 1982 or 1983, already famous and with a vast œuvre recognised worldwide, he went back one afternoon to see a bullfight in the Macarena bullring, in the city of his birth. And, he says, he immediately felt that here was a familiar and stimulating world to explore: ‘From then I started one painting after another, to the point where I became very taken with the subject, and for three years I just painted bulls. Then I began to paint other topics, but also bulls.’⁴⁰ In fact, they became his obsessive and almost exclusive passion to this day. The twenty-five paintings on bullfighting themes exhibited in the Malborough Gallery, New York, in 1985, would grow to eighty-six works (drawings, watercolours and oils) on the same topic, exhibited in Milan in 1987 and in the Hospital de los Venerables Sacerdotes in Seville in 1992. This sequence will reach a sort of apotheosis this autumn in 1992, when the hundreds of his works on the reality and the myth of bullfighting will fill the Grand Palais in Paris (while, at the same time, his monumental sculptures will line the Champs-Elysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Rond-Point).

It is not possible today to see the bullfight with the same clear conscience with which aficionados went to the bullrings when Botero and I dreamed of donning the bullfighter’s suit and facing up to a fierce Miura bull armed with a red cape. Culture and sensibilities have evolved to such a degree that it is more and more difficult to find arguments that do not seem to ourselves — who have experienced moments of overwhelming intensity watching a good bullfight — fallacious and inconsistent. I know them all, from the one about traditions and customs, national traits and cultural identity to the argument that goes, ‘Will we have to give up steaks and ham as well?’, to say nothing of the idea that ‘animals don’t have feelings like humans’ or the notion of fair play: doesn’t the bull also have a chance to gore the bullfighter? I have used them in thousands of arguments, defending the bullfight to the death against its detractors, but I believe them less and less. Because there is no rational argument that can justify the cruelty behind this beautiful spectacle, the inhumanity that underlies the indescribable grace, elegance, courage and drama that a great bullfight can achieve.

Because, unlike what happens to the bullfight when Botero turns it into oils, drawings, prints and sculptures and frees it from all moral contingency, reducing it to pure sensation, to healthy pleasure, what in real life attracts and bewitches us in the bullfight is its dirty beauty, the way in which it transgresses certain basic laws, like the law, essential to the survival of the community, which argues for the preservation of life, the defence of life against death in all circumstances. The bullfight is a festival of death, inflicting and accepting death, defying and becoming intoxicated by death, playing with it, with proud contempt for one’s own life and the life of others. The beautiful images that can be displayed when the person executing this terrible dance does it with skill and inspiration, and is aided by the animal — that we then call noble and thoroughbred — does not diminish one iota the violence of the spectacle, or justify it in moral terms. It simply offers an aesthetic alibi to the ferocious pleasure that it gives us, clothing in civilised garb the appetite that, deep within us, links us to our remote ancestors and their savage rites, in which they could unleash their worst instincts, the instincts that need destruction and blood to be sated.

All this appears in a luminous manner, by contrast, when we put the real bullfight alongside the extraordinary bullfight saga that Botero has been developing over the last ten years. Few artists in the history of painting have worked on a topic with such detail and sympathy as he has done with the bullfight, reconstructing it in all its variety and richness, with its cast of characters, its setting and its myths, its colour, rituals and emblems. Here we find the swords, the picadors, the banderilleros, and the bullfighter’s assistants, the officials, the lowly picador assistants and the lively women in the stands, and the beauties in the enclosures where the matadors go to celebrate their triumphs or to console themselves when they fail. And here are the horses, the blindfolded draught horses bowed under the weight of the picadors, and the bulls charging, going under the cape, or dying with a sword of steel in their entrails.

They are also very beautiful images, and some of them, like the oil painting from 1988, La cornada (Being Gored), one of the great artistic achievements of Botero’s entire œuvre, almost agonisingly perfect. However, even the most inexperienced spectator can see immediately that an unbridgeable gap separates this bullfighting world from the world that inspires it. This is a fictional world: without deception, malice or instinct, purely sensory and benevolent, which celebrates life, not death, and which lives pleasure with the serene self-confidence of the hedonist. Unlike the disturbing bullfighting visions of Goya, which explore the human depths, or those of Picasso, which are always invaded by the irrationality of desire and the violence of sex, Botero’s bullfight is a civilised celebration of the senses, in which a discreet intelligence and a flawless technique have skilfully remade the world of the bullfight, purifying it, stripping it of all that burden of barbarism and cruelty that links the real bullfight to the most irresponsible and terrifying aspects of human experience.

It is wrong to think that Botero fattens people and things just to make them more colourful, to give them more substance, to make them more rounded and imposing. In fact the swelling that his brushes impress on reality has an ontological effect: it empties the people and objects of this world of all sentimental, intellectual and moral content. They are reduced to physical presences, to forms that refer in a sensory way to certain models of real life, but which contradict and disown this real life.

At the same time it removes them from the river of time, from the nightmare of chronology and places them in an eternal immobility, in a fixed and everlasting reality. From that vantage point, splendid in their multicoloured attire, innocent and bovine in their abundance, frozen at some instant in their lives, when they were still part of history — driving in a goad, drawing the bull away, adorning themselves with capes or, most frequently, looking at the world, looking at us, with that stony absorption, with a sort of metaphysical indifference — they pose for us, offering themselves for us to admire.

The truth is that it is impossible not to envy them. How superior and perfect they seem, compared to us, miserable mortals, who are slowly ravaged and finally obliterated by time. They do not suffer, they do not think, they are not prey to thoughts that hinder or distort their behaviour; they are pure presence, existences without essences, a life that is lived for itself with an enjoyment that is limitless and without remorse.

Among modern painters, Botero represents as few others the classical tradition, in particular his favourite models, the painters of the Italian Quattrocento, who did not paint to express any disagreement with the world or to protest against life, but rather to perfect the world and life through art, offering certain models and ideal forms that men and women and society should seek to emulate in order to become better and less unhappy. As in the great Renaissance canvases, in Botero’s painting there is a profound acceptance of life as it is, of the world we have been given, and a systematic attempt to translate this reality into the realm of art purged of everything that might sully, impoverish or corrupt it. This might be a chimerical quest, at a time when no one believes any longer that art makes men and women better and happier: the suspicion is, rather, that an acute sensibility is a passport to unhappiness. However, this does not devalue, but rather reinforces the singularity of this tireless artist who, while he has always retained an affable and rather shy Andean demeanour, a provincial circumspection, has, throughout this whole creative career, been able to swim against the tide: being a realist when fashion demanded that painters should be abstract, finding sources of inspiration in regional and local topics when it was obligatory to drink from cosmopolitan wells, daring to be colourful and decorative when these notions seem antithetical to the very meaning of art and, above all, painting to express his love and contentment with life when the greatest artists of his time painted to express its horror and impossibility.

With Botero we can go to the bullfight to enjoy the blood and the death, without any guilty conscience.

London, August 1992