The husband who does sums at his own wedding

Now the bride. “Daum” stands beside the machine-man, painted soft and pale in ink and watercolour: largely undressed, in underwear and a floppy grey hat, sensual, turned toward her husband. She is all living flesh and present desire. And the husband, at the very moment she offers herself, turns away to do arithmetic. Numbers, figures, calculations cluster around the automaton; he attends, as Grosz’s publisher Wieland Herzfelde put it, to “soberly pedantic arithmetical problems.” That is the joke, told without a punchline: a wedding night in which the groom does sums.

The contrast is the entire point. Warm painted flesh against cold pasted mechanism.Desire on one side, calculation on the other. The marriage, as Herzfelde put it, comes between bride and groom “like a shadow,” because the groom is a machine and a machine cannot want anything; it can only compute. Grosz is not drawing a difficult marriage. He is drawing the impossibility of one, when the husband has been hollowed out into an apparatus.

It is worth saying that the bride is a spectacle here, not a person. The half-undressed woman offered up to the viewer’s eye was the default visual grammar of the period, and Grosz reaches for it without questioning it: her body is a device in an argument about men. His own Berlin Dada colleague Hannah Höch was, in these same years, turning her scissors on exactly that convention, cutting up the bride and the male gaze as her own subject. Grosz does not.

And the man being skewered is not really “George” the individual; he is a type. The man-machine was Grosz’s standing emblem for the whole bourgeois male of postwar Germany: rationalised, emotion-dead, sexually finished, the respectable husband as a wind-up doll. The same year, Grosz painted two faceless robot-men in his Republican Automatons (now at the Museum of Modern Art) to make the same charge about the new republic’s obedient citizens. (That picture, not this one, is the one sometimes wrongly tied to “Marshal Pétain”; this wedding picture has nothing to do with Pétain, and the short title for it is “Daum” Marries Her Pedantic Automaton “George.”)

So the wedding is the alibi. The real subject is the anti-bourgeois, anti-militarist satire that drove all of Grosz’s work: the diagnosis that the comfortable German man had become a machine, dead to feeling, fit only to calculate, and that he carried that deadness into the most intimate room in his life. Grosz aimed the charge at his whole class, and, with characteristic nerve, cast himself, the groom, as its specimen.