Art to Heart Invitation

George Grosz: Metropolis

©2002 by Jeff Dugan

If you can make it here, baby, you can make it anywhere!  The big city.  Honking horns, bright lights, hustle and bustle.  A dazzling adventure around every corner.  At first glance, that might be what you’d think the artist is portraying here.

Looking closer, though, what we see is not so energizing.  This is no bustling crowd, it’s a melee of bizarre sub-human creatures who seem to be part skeleton, part ghoul, or part rat.  And the red light that throbs pervasively through the city is not so much bright and dazzling as it is feverish and grim.  There are many works of art that attempt to portray a vision of heaven; this one is a taste of hell on earth.

Sadly, it’s less a product of fantasy than we’d like to think.  The city is not New York, but Berlin, Germany, shortly after the end of World War I.   

As a soldier in the German army, George Grosz experienced the horrors of the war first hand, and even underwent psychiatric treatment for the effect it had on him.  America experienced peace after the war.  In the Germany shown here, there may be a cessation of military action, but there is no peace.  The pressures of economic devastation and the humiliation of defeat drive the population into a seething desperation that feeds upon itself, robbing mankind of its humanity – reversing the benefits of the resurrection by transforming holy, eternal beings into a mob of rabid animals.

These people have been defeated and overrun by an enemy army.  They have lost the ability to believe in divine favor; for them, God must be dead.  And all that remains is the absence of hope, the absence of faith, the absence of love.  This, more than the dynamic life of the metropolis, is the portrait that Grosz has captured.  The anxious desperation, the self-delusion, the ugly brutality charge apocalyptically across the canvas.

This is not how it looked, but it must be something like how it felt to be an Israelite who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and experienced captivity in Babylon.  It’s not a pretty picture at all, but its very ugliness gives us a glimpse of the very real suffering they endured as a result of their disobedience.  And it challenges us to face the uncomfortable reality that we, too, are perfectly capable of turning away from God, and facing the terror of life without Him. 

Will you, today, turn away from God?  Will you intentionally walk away from Him, into the turbulent loneliness, the angst-ridden chaos, the crushing betrayal of the dark hole that seeks to swallow the world?  It seems a ridiculous question, but in Deuteronomy God offers the Israelites a clear choice between life and death, and even goes so far as to tell them, to “choose life.”  And yet many of them chose death over life, darkness over light.  Through the years down to this very day,  people have persisted in choosing death and darkness.  Won’t you take your stand against the tragedy of history?  Today the light shines upon you.  Hope stands within your grasp.  You actually can choose death, but I implore you to choose life.