Daum Marries Her Pedantic Automaton George

A wedding announcement to a friend, in which Grosz paints himself as a clockwork robot, his half-naked bride beside him, and the machine-husband turns away from her body to do sums.

1. 1
   The automaton groom (Grosz himself)

   Right of centre, the smaller figure, a man with a whitish-grey head like a mask

   This is the “pedantic automaton ‘George’” of the title, and it is Grosz’s own self-portrait: a man pieced together from body and machine parts, his head a grey mask. What matters is what he does not do. He does not look at his bride. The groom at his own wedding has his attention somewhere else entirely.
2. 2
   He is literally collaged

   The groom’s body, set against the hand-painted bride

   Where the bride is drawn and painted by hand, the husband is assembled from photographs cut out of newspapers and magazines and pasted down (collage, also called photomontage when the scraps are press photographs). The two halves of the picture use two opposed techniques on purpose: living, painted flesh on one side, cut-and-pasted machine-man on the other. The individual clippings cannot be reliably identified, so what matters is the method, not which photo is which.
3. 3
   “Daum,” the bride

   Beside the groom, a pale woman in underwear and a floppy grey hat

   The bride is rendered in soft, traditional ink and watercolour: undressed, sensual, turned toward the machine-man who will not turn toward her. “Daum” is an anagram of “Maud,” Grosz’s nickname for his wife, Eva (her surname is recorded as both Peter and Peters). She is a spectacle, not a person, the warm pole of an argument Grosz is making about men. Vivid painted flesh against cold pasted mechanism, the whole tension of the picture in one pairing.
4. 4
   The machine parts

   Through and around the groom: gears, fittings, apparatus

   Clockwork and machine fittings mark the husband as a wind-up mechanism rather than a man. This is the man-machine motif at the centre of Berlin Dada, Grosz’s recurring emblem of a rationalised, emotion-dead modern male (he built faceless robot-men the same year in his Republican Automatons, now at MoMA). The body is not a body; it is an apparatus.
5. 5
   The numbers and diagrams

   Near the automaton, figures and calculations

   The groom attends to what his publisher Wieland Herzfelde called “soberly pedantic arithmetical problems”: numbers, figures, diagrams, set right at the moment of intimacy. The arithmetic stands in for his emotional deadness. The exact sums shown are not the point, and are not reliably transcribed; the point is that a man is doing maths instead of looking at his half-naked bride.
6. 6
   The irreal city behind them

   The background: hard-edged architecture and perspective lines

   Behind the couple is an empty, de-peopled urban backdrop of architectural fragments and steep perspective, openly borrowed from the metaphysical city-and-mannequin paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, the same source Grosz mined for all his 1920 automaton pictures. It is a stage set for machines, not a place where people live.