Art: Enemy of the State

Great artistry and great anger together made Francisco Goya's etchings of the Napoleonic War immortal. The bestialities of the last War were likewise excoriated by German Artist George Grosz. But not often in history has a regime officially at peace stirred an etcher to the anger and disgust shown in a portfolio to be exhibited early this month at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Entitled Ecraser l'Infàme ("Crush the Infamous"), these etchings are by a 33-year-old Austrian, Baron Rudolf Charles von Ripper, an "Aryan" and devout Roman Catholic, who, in the winter of 1933-34, spent three and a half months in a Nazi political prison on a charge of high treason.

A self-taught artist and international wanderer, friend of Grosz in Berlin in the middle '20s, von Ripper resisted Nazi beatings so well that the late Austrian Government was finally able to rescue him. Elaborately Freudian and symbolic, his etchings are related in texture and technique as closely to Goya as to Contemporaries Grosz and Max Ernst. One of them is of the Man of the Year (see cover}. Artist von Ripper, an "Enemy of the State" in Germany, considers his work his answer to a Gestapo-Commissioner who warned him to keep his mouth shut.