Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) – Under the title “Glitter and poison of the 1920s. George Grosz in Berlin”, the Stuttgart State Gallery will be presenting works by George Grosz (1893-1959) from the Weimar Republic in the coming months. The focus is primarily on the drastic and provocative depictions and often political statements with which he knew how to comment on the conditions of his time by painting and drawing. His pictorial satires are classics of New Objectivity, which revealed the obscurity and double standards of the big city during the Weimar Republic and have retained their socially critical bite to this day.
Georg Gross, whose renaming to George Grosz is considered a protest against the First World War, established the Dada expressionist art movement in Berlin together with John Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde. His political work brought him a lot of legal trouble, he was repeatedly accused of “attacking public morals” or “blasphemy”. Before the Nazis could arrest him, he emigrated to the USA in 1933. He returned to Berlin shortly before his death in 1956.
A walk through the Stuttgart presentation of around 100 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints makes it clear how strongly Grosz shaped today’s idea of ??life and suffering in Berlin in the “Golden Twenties”. The pictures show the human abyss, the moral decay of German society after the First World War, but he also mixes horror with humor. “Grosz wanted to use his work to appeal to society’s conscience and take a look behind the facade,” explains the Staatsgalerie.
The works on display date mainly from the period between 1917 and 1933, they belong to public and private collections and are supplemented by pictures from the museum’s inventory.
