Small, and built from two opposite techniques
The first thing is scale. For all its fame this is a small sheet, about one foot four and a half inches tall by just under a foot wide (roughly 42 by 30 centimetres), portrait-shaped, taller than it is wide. It is not a wall-sized canvas. In fact it is not a canvas at all: it is a work on paper, made in watercolour, pen and ink, and collage on watercolour board. (It is sometimes described as “on canvas,” but the owning museum records a drawing-and-collage on board, and the museum is the authority.) That matters, because the whole picture turns on a contrast between two techniques, and both are visible on the surface.
The two techniques sit side by side. The bride is painted, by hand, in soft ink and watercolour: a pale, living woman. The groom is pasted, cut from photographs and reassembled into a machine. One half of the picture is drawn flesh; the other half is glued apparatus. Grosz did that on purpose, and it is the first thing to register, because the meaning of the whole image is carried by that split between a hand-made woman and a machine-made man.
A robot with a mask for a head
The groom stands right of centre, the smaller of the two figures. He is the “pedantic automaton ‘George’” of the title, and he is Grosz’s self-portrait: a man assembled from body parts and machine parts, his head a whitish-grey mask, gears and fittings marking him as a wind-up mechanism. His attention is not on his bride. The whole drama of the picture is in that turning-away: a husband at his own wedding who will not look at the woman beside him.
Around and behind the figures runs an irreal city: empty, hard-edged architecture and steep perspective lines, a place with no people in it. Grosz lifted this directly from Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian painter whose eerie, depopulated piazzas and faceless mannequins (his “metaphysical” pictures) Grosz drew on all through 1920. It is a stage set built for machines, not a street where anyone lives, and it presses the couple forward against a backdrop as cold as the groom himself.
A man you cannot read scrap by scrap
A collage like this is easy to over-read. The groom is built from photographs cut out of newspapers and magazines, but the individual clippings cannot be reliably identified, which paper, which photo, which machine, and the sources do not pin them down. The technique is the meaning here, not the inventory: a body made of pasted press-images, set against a bride made of paint. What the scraps add up to is a man assembled from the mass-media stream, not a man at all.