Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Heather Arnet, Ralf Kemper, Juerg Judin, Pay Matthis Karstens, Alice Delage, Karli Wurzelbacher.
German draughtsman George Grosz (1893–1959) created his last major series of paintings and watercolors, the “Stick Men”, beginning in the mid-1940s in reaction to the Holocaust and the other atrocities of the Second World War. The deployment of atomic bombs in Japan and the threat of a Third World War further deepened what the artist termed his “despair, hate and disillusionment.” In his final works, he drew his figures as dehumanized, famished beings aimlessly wandering through a contaminated, post-apocalyptic world. As the first exhibition of the “Stick Men” series following the artists’ death, this catalog contradicts the notion that Grosz had become “soft” and apolitical during his years spent in the United States. Rather, this series is the culmination of the political and artistic convictions of a lifetime of struggle: a timely and relevant legacy even today.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited with text by Ralph Jentsch. Text by Juerg Judin, Pay Matthis Karstens, Mechthild Hagemann.
This volume is dedicated to the early life and career of the brilliant young artist Georg Ehrenfried Gross (1893–1959), who would later become known as George Grosz. Known for his politically charged paintings and caricatural depictions of Berlin life in the 1920s, the youthful Gross had a long way to go before changing his name and becoming the most popular and sharp-tongued chronicler of the Weimar Republic. Gross made his first oil paintings in 1912 while still a student, and by 1914 was working in a style deeply influenced by Expressionism, Futurism and popular illustration. Presenting over 50 works made between the years 1904 and 1917, all but a few exhibited for the first time ever, the inaugural exhibition of Das kleine Grosz Museum, and this accompanying catalog, trace the artistic and biographical trajectory of this great artist's journey.
Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing. Essay by Lutz Becker.
Inspired by the same society that gave rise to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories and novels, the drawings in George Grosz: The Big No present a caustic, comic view of Germany in the troubled years of the Weimar Republic. Ranging from primitive and graffiti-like drawings to complex Futurist street scenes with teeming crowds of overlapping figures, this collection shows Grosz at the height of his satirical powers, through the works from his largest portfolio, Ecce Homo. Pimps, black-marketeers, prostitutes, demobbed soldiers and the nouveau-riche rub shoulders in drawings of razor-sharp acuity and technical precision. Also included are the powerful, anti-militarist Hintergrund drawings, originally published in 1928 to accompany Erwin Piscator’s production of The Good Soldier Schwejk, which resulted in criminal charges being brought against Grosz for “blasphemy and defamation of the German military.” George Grosz: The Big No is an essential guide to one of the twentieth century’s most important satirists.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Heike Fuhlbrügge, Ralph Jentsch, Jürg Judin, Barbara McCloskey.
The Dada caricaturist, draughtsman and painter George Grosz (1893-1959) spent more than half of his creative career--27 years--living and working in the United States. The effects of this emigration upon his art were once widely deemed to be wholly negative, since it seemingly marked a rejection of aggressively political satire: "I had simply lost all interest in human weaknesses and individual foibles," wrote Grosz in his autobiography, "and the further I drew away from them, the closer I felt to nature." Grosz was particularly passionate about the art of watercolor--so much so that shortly before his death in 1959 he began to write a book on watercolor technique--and his innovations in this area, alongside his caricatures of New York life and his more apocalyptic war paintings, have at last been retreived from the respective shadows of Grosz's own earlier work and of American Abstract Expressionism, which reigned supreme during Grosz's American years. This is the first book devoted to this crucial phase in his life.
Gross before Grosz: The Early Years
George Grosz: The Big No
George Grosz: The Years in America, 1933-1958