A peek behind the scenes -The John Rylands Library

Kevin Cummis Exhibition

Lever St, Manchester

George Grosz

 

George Grosz (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in 1933. After his emigration to the USA in 1933, Grosz "sharply rejected [his] previous work, and caricature in general."In place of his earlier corrosive vision of the city, he now painted conventional nudes and many landscape watercolors. More acerbic works, such as Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1944), were the exception. In his autobiography, he wrote: "A great deal that had become frozen within me in Germany melted here in America and I rediscovered my old yearning for painting. I carefully and deliberately destroyed a part of my past." Although a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s, Grosz's work turned toward a sentimental romanticism in America, a change generally seen as a decline.

 “My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon… . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands… I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket… I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.”    [George Grosz]    

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grosz
                                                                               

 The Grey Man Dances, 1949

  Suicide, 1926

The Painter of the Hole II, 1950

 Hitler In Hell, 1944

 In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art.                                              Robert Hughes

 Daum Marries her Pedantic Automaton “George” , 1920

 The Pillars of Society, 1926

“I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.”                                                                                              George Grosz

  The lovesick man, 1916

 The Survivor, 1944

 After serving during  I World War, Grosz settled in Berlin and joined the Dada movement. Far more political than their counterparts in Zurich or Paris, the Berlin Dadaists turned their art against local figures and institutions of authority. In paintings, watercolors, and collages, Grosz mixed the schematic simplicities of popular illustration with Expressionist distortion, Futurist fragmentation, and the mordant accuracy of the realism known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). In Grosz’s art, the modern city is a hellish, jostling place overpopulated by swinish capitalists, brutish soldiers, and degraded workers. Women are prostitutes or nouveaux riches hags.

When Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my Südende studio at five o’clock one May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.

                                                                                   George Grosz, 1928

First International Dada-Fair which was held in the Galerie Buchard, Berlin in summer 1920. This “exhibition” was both the climax of the Berlin Dada movement and its last public event. The organisers exhibited 174 “products” that they proclaimed “Anti-Art” ignoring traditional distinctions between original works and prints, and displayed provocative poster-manifestos on the walls.

The large political paintings by Otto Dix, “The War Cripples (45% Employable)” 1920 and George Grosz, “Germany, a Winter’s Tale” 1917 that were subsequently destroyed during the National Socialist period, can be seen on the left and right hand walls respectively. The suspension from the ceiling of a figure with the head of a pig and wearing an officer’s uniform was taken as an insult to the honour of the Ministry of Defence of the Weimar Republic and the resulting court case, which could have ended in a death penalty, fortunately only resulted in a small fine.

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