Ida (Study for Ivan Goll) (Ida ([Figurine für Ivan Goll]) (recto); Methusalem or the Eternal Businessman (Methusalem oder der Ewige Bürger) (verso)

In 1920s Germany, the theater and the cinema intersected with modern life as each art form began to produce works that included utopian visions, existing realities, and activist commentaries directed against contemporary living. Such is the background to this costume study by George Grosz for the Dadaist play Methusalem by Yvan Goll (1891–1950). Written in 1921, the drama pokes fun at a wealthy shoe manufacturer, Methusalem, and his plump wife, Amalie, who schemes for her daughter, the romantic Ida, to marry a rich man. Instead the radical, unnamed Student not only seduces Ida but also leads a strike against Methusalem’s company and assassinates its owner.  The designs Grosz produced are not so much costumes as huge life-size cutouts, which would completely obscure the actors behind them, literally transforming them into machines and equipping them with the appropriate attributes. In the ironic twist of her love for a murderer, Ida wears the chaste white dress and red cross of a nurse and holds in her hand an equally pure white lily or tulip. There is also another costume drawing of Amalie in the Smart Museum’s collection (acc. no. 1974.140). These colorful and carefully detailed studies vividly translate for the stage the dramatist Goll’s desire, as one commentator explains, “to return the ancient properties of magic to drama by the use of grotesque masks and alogical situations.”