The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours and Prints, 1912-1930
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Painting
The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours and Prints, 1912-1930 Details
From Kirkus Reviews This volume demonstrates how brilliantly Grosz caught the life, and more importantly the feverish imagination, of a city and a nation in a particularly turbulent time. Marrying the jumpy lines and figural distortions of cubism to narrative subjects and an angry sense of morality, he illuminated the tawdry, often violent, lives of Berlin's down-and-out, its powerbrokers, and its murderers, during the chaotic Weimar years of the 1920s, in corrosive, unsettling, kinetic images. The drawings and prints of drunken prostitutes and their leering customers, calm murderers inspecting the bodies of their victims, fat businessmen and their voluptuous mistresses, prim bourgeoisie and exhausted workers, and mutilated ex-soldiers, are complemented here by some of Grosz's less familiar, and equally disturbing, watercolors. Whitford, a former lecturer in art history at Cambridge, provides a useful introduction to Grosz's life and times, and detailed and very helpful annotations to the artwork. A superb overview of a unique career. (139 b&w and 54 color illustrations) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Read more Review Few artists have truly defined an era. George Grosz, the great truth-teller of Weimar Germany and the early Nazi years, came as close as any.... Though full of dark humor, many of the images retain their power to shock. -- The New York Times Book Review, Ted Loos Read more
Reviews
For many years, while giving several of my libraries to charities, as I moved from one to another working site, I clung to my copy of George Grosz's Ecce Homo, his early portfolio of drawings and watercolors in book form. I still have it, along with the growing bookshelf of books with and about his art.While he did much other work in Germany and in the United States, to which he emigrated, while he was much respected by the American artists with whom he associated in his exile, it is still the politically inspired art for which he is best known and for which he is, and will be, best remembered.While Otto Dix surpassed him in his articulation of the horrors of World War 1, having been through almost every moment of it as a combat machine gunner and leader of a machine gun squad, and Max Beckmann commanded far more respect for his penetrating insight and command of the tools of art in years further beyond those of the early Weimar period, neither they nor anyone else surpassed Grosz in biting visual commentary on the political scene of the post-war period. While a master of the graphic and watercolor arts, Grosz never reached the same level of skill or insight in his paintings. In that, Beckmann was his superior.Without making comparison with the other major books available on his career, I am confident that one who seeks familiarity with that period of his life's work as well as the beginnings of his less vituperative career, will find ample reward in this volume.Frank Whitford skillfully draws together strands of his life and personality useful in the effort to understand him but excels in the brief commentaries accompanying each drawing, print and watercolor. The pictures are quite good and are amply illustrative of the tenor of his approach.Regrettably, the price of a new copy has multiplied exponentially in recent years, but, hopefully, decent copies are available at the lesser prices shown this date on Amazon.