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Lot Essay
Grosz was an artist who saw the cataclysm of Nazism coming. Throughout the 1920s in Berlin he struggled virulently through his art to reflect the grotesque underside of the flawed society in which he lived. Grosz's experiences under Prussian militarism during the First World War had provoked in him a seething hatred of man's baser instincts and awoke in him the realisation that the responsibility and guilt for the crime of the War lay at the doors of the ruling classes of Europe. With the violent put-down of the popular Spartacist revolution in Germany during the winter of 1918-1919 Grosz saw that his duty as an artist was to place his work at the service of a revolution against such Capitalist oppression. Art was only of any point, he asserted, if it were to be used as a "weapon" in the fight for freedom, any artistic activity which was not directed towards such a purpose rendered the artist's tools useless - a painter's brushes, Grosz declared, would become merely 'hollow wisps of straw.'
Venting his anger at the Germans' acceptance of the status quo Grosz saw it as his moral responsibility to reflect the double-standards, hypocrisy, and downright sordidness of the increasingly decadent Berlin society in which he lived. With inflation running at insane levels, prostitution and corruption rife, and millions of people out of work, malnourished and often nearing starvation, Grosz portrayed the bankruptcy of modern German culture in all its lurid and fascinating detail.
The watercolour Ecce Homo, which Grosz painted in 1921, is one of his finest exposés of the gaudy decadence of the Weimar years. Using an easy flowing pen and ink line that, having evolved out of his "knife-hard" graffiti-based style of a few years earlier, has now developed a disquieting elegance, Grosz depicts a heavy-scented bordello scene, in which man's basic animal lust is laid bare through the artist's sharp-eyed depiction of all its decorative trappings. With one seedy customer recently gone out of the door (perhaps the ugly, bruised, cigar smoker shown at the bottom of the picture), an erotically reclining wide-hipped nude entertains a new admirer. Her flesh still seems to sport the marks of recent man-handling, while the nonchalant way in which she smokes a cigarette and her overt sense of ease over her nakedness while engaging in conversation with a well-dressed and slightly effete-looking client distinguishes her as one of the finest examples of human flesh-for-sale since Manet's Olympia.
Onto the wiry and incisive framework of his ink drawing, Grosz has liberally applied the warm lurid colours of the boudoir so that the picture too seems to reek of cheap cosmetics and perfume. The provocative title of this watercolour completes the deep sense of cynicism and disgust that seems to seep through the acidic scratch and burn of every stroke of Grosz's pen. "Ecce Homo" - Latin for "behold the man" - originally stems from the Gospel of St John and was used to describe Christ adorned with a crown of thorns. More recently, in 1888, these biblically-derived words had been appropriated by Friedrich Nietzsche as the title for his book "Ecce Homo" in which his philosophy of mankind's need for self-determination and individuation in the absence of God was outlined. Grosz has used "Ecce Homo" as an ironic attack on both these previous meanings. Applied here to this work it sardonically reasserts Grosz's belief that ultimately "all men are pigs. All that talk about ethics is eyewash, meant only for the stupid. Life has no meaning other than to satisfy one's hunger for food and women" (Grosz, Art is in Danger , 1925).
"Ecce Homo" was also the title Grosz gave to a compendium of his drawings and watercolours first published in December 1922 that catalogued the whole range of social diseases afflicting Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. Consisting of 100 photo-transferred lithographic prints of 84 drawings and 16 watercolours, including this, the title work of the collection, it presented a carnival of images of a world gone mad. Pimps and profiteers, syphilitic whores and seedy little murderers rubbed shoulders with an abused and starving proletariat suffering under the greed and gluttony of their fat self-important bosses. Circus freaks, war-cripples and acrobats, litter the order of the world of petit-bourgeois respectability while above everything the unfeeling hubris of Germany's aristocratic proto-fascist and military-loving ruling classes looks down on the world with disdain as if life was continuing as normal. The sharpness of Grosz's critique and the brilliance of his observation reflected the intensity with which he felt the growing menace all around him. "I was each one of the very characters I drew," Grosz later observed "the champagne-swilling glutton favoured by fate no less than the poor beggar standing with outstretched hands in the rain. I was split in two, just like society at large." (George Grosz, A Small Yes and a Big No, trans. A. J. Pomerans, Huntingdon, NY, 1955, p. 97)
So accurately did "Ecce Homo" lift the lid on the Weimar Republic's particularly extensive can of worms that it soon landed Grosz in court on a charge of obscenity and for offending public morals. The eventual outcome of this indictment was that Grosz and his publishers were found guilty and seventeen works, including the colour print of this watercolour, no. IV (Ecce Homo), were confiscated as they were deemed, by order of the Charlottenburg District Court, to be "by the manner in which they are drawn, in particular the emphasis on sexual matters, principally the prominence of the sexual organs, designed to violate the propriety and moral sense of a normal thinking person with regard to sexual matters". (Court records for April 25 1923, cited in George Grosz das druckgraphishce Werk , Alexander Dückers, San Francisco, 1996, p. 361).
In the aftermath of the trial and its judgement an article signed "-r" appeared in the Vossische Zeitung under the title "George Grosz found guilty, 'Normal thinking' victorious." It observed that Grosz had "in vain (attempted) to make it clear that he strove passionately to pinpoint the weaknesses and depravities of his time and his society, and that he believed he could only come close to this goal if he ruthlessly exposed the truth." It also warned that putting so-called "normal thinking" above the "opinion of people knowledgeable about art and intellectuals" was effectively placing the "authority of the ignorant over that of the knowledgeable". These words, like the warnings over a divided society and the hubris of the ruling class contained in "Ecce Homo", were, of course, to prove all-too prophetic.
Venting his anger at the Germans' acceptance of the status quo Grosz saw it as his moral responsibility to reflect the double-standards, hypocrisy, and downright sordidness of the increasingly decadent Berlin society in which he lived. With inflation running at insane levels, prostitution and corruption rife, and millions of people out of work, malnourished and often nearing starvation, Grosz portrayed the bankruptcy of modern German culture in all its lurid and fascinating detail.
The watercolour Ecce Homo, which Grosz painted in 1921, is one of his finest exposés of the gaudy decadence of the Weimar years. Using an easy flowing pen and ink line that, having evolved out of his "knife-hard" graffiti-based style of a few years earlier, has now developed a disquieting elegance, Grosz depicts a heavy-scented bordello scene, in which man's basic animal lust is laid bare through the artist's sharp-eyed depiction of all its decorative trappings. With one seedy customer recently gone out of the door (perhaps the ugly, bruised, cigar smoker shown at the bottom of the picture), an erotically reclining wide-hipped nude entertains a new admirer. Her flesh still seems to sport the marks of recent man-handling, while the nonchalant way in which she smokes a cigarette and her overt sense of ease over her nakedness while engaging in conversation with a well-dressed and slightly effete-looking client distinguishes her as one of the finest examples of human flesh-for-sale since Manet's Olympia.
Onto the wiry and incisive framework of his ink drawing, Grosz has liberally applied the warm lurid colours of the boudoir so that the picture too seems to reek of cheap cosmetics and perfume. The provocative title of this watercolour completes the deep sense of cynicism and disgust that seems to seep through the acidic scratch and burn of every stroke of Grosz's pen. "Ecce Homo" - Latin for "behold the man" - originally stems from the Gospel of St John and was used to describe Christ adorned with a crown of thorns. More recently, in 1888, these biblically-derived words had been appropriated by Friedrich Nietzsche as the title for his book "Ecce Homo" in which his philosophy of mankind's need for self-determination and individuation in the absence of God was outlined. Grosz has used "Ecce Homo" as an ironic attack on both these previous meanings. Applied here to this work it sardonically reasserts Grosz's belief that ultimately "all men are pigs. All that talk about ethics is eyewash, meant only for the stupid. Life has no meaning other than to satisfy one's hunger for food and women" (Grosz, Art is in Danger , 1925).
"Ecce Homo" was also the title Grosz gave to a compendium of his drawings and watercolours first published in December 1922 that catalogued the whole range of social diseases afflicting Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. Consisting of 100 photo-transferred lithographic prints of 84 drawings and 16 watercolours, including this, the title work of the collection, it presented a carnival of images of a world gone mad. Pimps and profiteers, syphilitic whores and seedy little murderers rubbed shoulders with an abused and starving proletariat suffering under the greed and gluttony of their fat self-important bosses. Circus freaks, war-cripples and acrobats, litter the order of the world of petit-bourgeois respectability while above everything the unfeeling hubris of Germany's aristocratic proto-fascist and military-loving ruling classes looks down on the world with disdain as if life was continuing as normal. The sharpness of Grosz's critique and the brilliance of his observation reflected the intensity with which he felt the growing menace all around him. "I was each one of the very characters I drew," Grosz later observed "the champagne-swilling glutton favoured by fate no less than the poor beggar standing with outstretched hands in the rain. I was split in two, just like society at large." (George Grosz, A Small Yes and a Big No, trans. A. J. Pomerans, Huntingdon, NY, 1955, p. 97)
So accurately did "Ecce Homo" lift the lid on the Weimar Republic's particularly extensive can of worms that it soon landed Grosz in court on a charge of obscenity and for offending public morals. The eventual outcome of this indictment was that Grosz and his publishers were found guilty and seventeen works, including the colour print of this watercolour, no. IV (Ecce Homo), were confiscated as they were deemed, by order of the Charlottenburg District Court, to be "by the manner in which they are drawn, in particular the emphasis on sexual matters, principally the prominence of the sexual organs, designed to violate the propriety and moral sense of a normal thinking person with regard to sexual matters". (Court records for April 25 1923, cited in George Grosz das druckgraphishce Werk , Alexander Dückers, San Francisco, 1996, p. 361).
In the aftermath of the trial and its judgement an article signed "-r" appeared in the Vossische Zeitung under the title "George Grosz found guilty, 'Normal thinking' victorious." It observed that Grosz had "in vain (attempted) to make it clear that he strove passionately to pinpoint the weaknesses and depravities of his time and his society, and that he believed he could only come close to this goal if he ruthlessly exposed the truth." It also warned that putting so-called "normal thinking" above the "opinion of people knowledgeable about art and intellectuals" was effectively placing the "authority of the ignorant over that of the knowledgeable". These words, like the warnings over a divided society and the hubris of the ruling class contained in "Ecce Homo", were, of course, to prove all-too prophetic.