Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
George Grosz
American, German; 20th-century
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
41%
The Wanderer. 1943. Oil on canvas
One really, really wishes that one could chalk this painting's weirdnesses up to genius, but they don't congeal, they don't work off of each other, they don't add up to anything but a sum of strange ideas in paint — so one has to chalk it up to folly. Maybe with one or two fewer representational elements this painting could've worked: take out the birds and the reeds, or the explosion and the birds, or even just the wanderer himself (!), and maybe you'd have few enough meaning-making elements within the image that all those whorls of color would be forced to do the sort of groundless double-duty signifying work that can make abstraction make sense. But as it is that human figure is sapping a freeness of form from the daubs all around him — it's like he's literally absorbing and then hoarding all the things the paint wants the possibility to be. There's something wrong with the way the tendrils of white paint at the wanderer's feet echo the curves of the plants he's walking towards; pinks recur almost eerily. (2025)