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[[image]] Fig. 12. August Macke, Man Reading in the Park (Bonn), 1914. Oil on canvas, 34 x 39 3/8". Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. [[image]] Fig. 13. John Heartfield, The Finest Products of Capitalism, 1932. Photomontage. [[image]] Fig. 14. Wolf Vostell, Miss America, 1968. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. [[image]] Fig. 15. George Grosz, Germany, a Winter's Tale, 1917-19. Present whereabouts unknown. reader and the poet are one. The shattered reality of an impersonal world mirrors the shatter psyche of the poet who conscientiously reconstructs through mechanically copying words. The recipe is a classic blend of ritualistic rigor and inane potentiality. While the image of the newspaper-reader was one of the unthinking, ordinary bourgeois, the gesture of the artist was supremely apt. Tzara, the artist, was the thinking man, attacking impotent rationality with a double edge. The Dada artists used many materials, but cutting up a fashion magazine would have created a very different poem. George Grosz, the "Propagandada," loved newspapers for their ability to propagate ideas, but his collages most often show the newspaper as a prop of the eternal bourgeois. Germany, a Winter's Tale (Fig. 15) represents, in Grosz's own words, "the eternal German bourgeois, fat and fearful . . . clinging desperately to his knife and fork; the world as reeling around him...."15 The collaged newspaper, part of the central still life, is the Lokal-Anzeiger, published by August Scher. This popular newspaper has been described as merging "popular journalism and the serial novel, which did for newspapers what soap opera does for television."16 Now a sedentary involvement suggested a narrow-minded, gluttonous, and self-satisfied Burger. The "simple newspaper-reader" was portrayed as ineffectual and out of control. In the artist's large Pillars of Society of 1926, newspapers are painted as collage-like attributes under the arm of the stereotyped image of the German citizen. Grosz recognized that the distorting political biases of newspapers were a caricatured literary form which mirrored, amplified, and even helped create the caricatured citizens of the world he portrayed as the New Objectivity. Just four years after Macke was killed at the front, Otto Dix also painted men, their newspapers, and the activity of the city streets. After four years in the trenches, the 29-year-old German artist saw a very different world as Prager Street shows (Fig. 16). Fragmentation takes on a grotesque meaning in this collage. In the background, shop 83
