GEORGE GROSZ (1892 - 1959, Berlin) Lot n° 39

Bourgeois world Pen and ink on wove paper (papier vélin). 1918. 58,3 x 44,5 cm. Signed "Grosz" in pencil lower right. Provenance: Studio of the artist Berlin 1918 / Swetzoff Gallery, Boston / Private collection Carl N. Schmalz / Private collection Berlin. Important, large-scale drawing from George Grosz' most important period. Confirmed by Ralph Jentsch (expert opinion dated 24.10.2013). In 1915 Grosz achieved in his works the "razor-sharp" style with which he depicts - almost dissecting - bourgeois life in Berlin. In large-format watercolors and drawings and with his characteristic eye, he depicts metropolitan life in the metropolis in sometimes grotesque scenes: Criticizing the petty bourgeois narrow-mindedness he hated, he rarely spares the viewer precarious details of male desire and the availability of the female body. A planned three-volume compendium entitled "The Ugliness of the Germans" was also to be devoted to this theme in a socially critical manner. Grosz composed the "everyday scenes" of these sheets from moving figures, often stereotypes of certain characters, as well as architectural details of the urban landscape. In our drawing, men rush to work, a prostitute roams the street in search of customers. Some tables of the sidewalk café are occupied. The men, except perhaps for that melancholy muser in the foreground, are disillusioned and wear ugly, almost grimacing faces. In the background Grosz refers with house facades and smoking chimneys to the partly dramatic housing situation and the city of the time as an industrial metropolis, above which - as is often the case with him - is a sun whose rays illuminate nothing positive, but rather irradiate the scenery almost destructively. With the end of the war production of weapons, the number of unemployed increases. Like the emaciated population, the economy and industry recover only slowly. New perspectives are promised by the merger into Greater Berlin in 1920, which makes Berlin the third largest city in the world after London and New York, with all its social misery and human abysses.