From a Malik portfolio to a Berlin museum

In 1922 Grosz gathered his Dada works of the previous years into a portfolio published by the family press, the Malik-Verlag, under a title that names the whole method: Mit Pinsel und Schere: 7 Materialisationen, “With Brush and Scissors: 7 Materialisations.” Brush and scissors, paint and collage, the two techniques the wedding picture sets against each other, are right there in the name. The work was reproduced inside it, classed by Grosz as one of his “meta-mechanical constructions” (in German, metamechanische Konstruktionen), his own genre-tag for the man-machine assembly, not a second line painted onto the picture. After that, the trail goes quiet.

The picture’s ownership history (its provenance, the documented chain of who has held a work, from the artist’s hand to now) has a long gap in the middle. Between Grosz’s studio in 1920 and the museum, the accessible sources name no intervening owners, so none are invented here. Where the record picks up again is 1995, when the work was acquired by the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s state museum of modern art, photography and architecture, with funds from the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin(a Berlin lottery foundation that supports the city’s cultural purchases). That is roughly seventy-five years after Grosz made it. It hangs in that collection today.

A note on the rights, because museum pages will show a “©” on this image. The work was published in 1920, which makes it public domain in the United States (US copyright on a work this old turns on the date of publication). In Germany and the European Union, where copyright runs for the artist’s life plus seventy years, it stays protected until the end of 2029 (Grosz died in 1959). The copyright notice you see is a European claim; it does not govern use in the United States.

The collaborator named in the title, John Heartfield, went on to turn the cut-and-paste technique he and Grosz pioneered into the most ferocious anti-Nazi photomontages of the 1930s, the line of political collage that runs straight out of pictures like this one. Grosz’s own road led the other way, into paint. The clinical, unsentimental Weimar realism that art history calls Neue Sachlichkeit(“New Objectivity”) took the cold diagnostic eye of this picture and dropped the Dada scissors; Grosz became one of its central figures, and you can already see it here in the surgical way the marriage is laid open. He himself, his name on a Nazi blacklist, left Germany for the United States in 1933, just before Hitler took power, and lived out most of his career in New York before dying in Berlin in 1959.

The wedding picture has aged into one of the defining images of Berlin Dada: a small sheet, barely a foot and a half tall, that holds the whole bitterness of the movement in a single domestic joke. A man marries a woman and turns away from her to do sums; the husband is a machine and the artist is the husband. It is one of the sharpest small things Berlin Dada made, Grosz’s despair, hate and disillusionment, the creed he drew by, pointed for once not at the generals or the profiteers but at himself, at his own wedding, in the month it happened.