When Dada stopped playing and started accusing

Two things came before this picture and set it off. The first is the kind of Dada it reacts against. Zurich Dada, the original, was abstract and playful: sound-poems, chance arrangements, nonsense performed at the Cabaret Voltaire, an anti-art that refused meaning on principle. It laughed; it did not accuse. The second is the kind of collage that existed before. A decade earlier Picasso and Braque had glued scraps of newspaper and oilcloth onto their Cubist pictures, but they used those scraps as neutral texture and form, a fragment chosen for how it looked on the surface, not for what it said.

Berlin Dada, and this picture, weaponise both of those tools. Take the man-machine first. Grosz casts himself, and through himself the respectable bourgeois male, as a clockwork automaton: emotionless, rationalised, sexually dead, kin to the war-veteran rebuilt from prosthetics that Grosz drew on the streets outside. This is the opposite of the Italian Futurists, who a few years earlier had celebrated the machine as speed and glory. Grosz turns the body-as-machine into a diagnosis: the modern man has been hollowed into an apparatus, and that is an accusation, not a hymn.

Then take the collage. The groom is literally cut out of press photographs and reassembled, the technique Grosz and Heartfield were pioneering, but here it is pointed at a target. Pasted reality, the actual printed image-world of 1920 Germany, is turned against the society that produced it. Collage stops being a formal game about a picture’s surface and becomes political and sexual montage. Dada stops playing and starts shooting: the man-machine and the scissors become a satirical weapon aimed at the bourgeoisie.

Grosz left no documented statement about this particular picture. But he said plenty, again and again, about why he drew at all, and it is worth hearing in his own words, kept as a general statement of his aims rather than a caption for this one sheet. Recalling his early work in his own memoirs and quoted ever since, Grosz described it like this:

“My drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment. I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon…”

That is the engine behind the wedding picture. Grosz also said, in much-quoted form, that he drew “as an act of protest,” trying to convince the world that it was ugly, sick and hypocritical; and he liked to say his art should serve as a kind of weapon in a political fight (the wording of that last claim circulates in several versions, so take the sense and not a quoted sentence). All of it is Grosz’s standing creed, not a remark about Daum. The despair, the hate, the disillusionment is what he poured into a portrait of his own marriage.