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Lot Essay
Ralph Jentsch has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
“Barbarism prevailed... The times were certainly mad!” George Grosz wrote, describing the chaos in Germany following the nation’s humiliating defeat at the end of the First World War. “Morality as such no longer existed. A wave of prostitution and obscenity swept the land” (A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz, New York, 1946, p. 168). This watercolor illustrates a little corner in a society reeling from the ravages of mass unemployment and rampant inflation. “Everyone who had nothing wanted something,” Grosz observed, “and everyone who had something sold it for many times its value... The higher the scale of values, the greater the lust for living” (ibid., pp. 170 and 171).
While clients endlessly come and go, the drunk, cigar-chomping pimp at the table in this sleazy basement brothel can only curse his fate, that after so much crude exploitation on his part, he has actually gained little to show for it. He earlier appeared in a more upscale setting–or is he dreaming?–in Ecce Homo, 1921, the title work in Grosz’s book collection of 16 watercolors and 84 drawings, executed during the past seven years, which Malik-Verlag published at the end of 1922. The many extraordinary qualities of the present Orgie, from an insouciantly blasé scatological vignette to the artist’s superlative skill as a watercolorist, may have made this work a candidate for inclusion as well. Grosz perhaps concluded, however, that after already having awarded star billing to his dyspeptic pimp, and then having put him on the cover of the book, directly above the title–just as Pilate brought forth Christ and declared to the mob “Behold the Man”–he had given this fellow enough attention.
The tumultuous, even dangerous events that beset the fledgling Weimar Republic both challenged and inspired Grosz, not yet thirty, to create his very best work. During the brutal ultra-rightist, para-military suppression of the leftist Spartacist uprising in 1919, he narrowly avoided arrest and summary execution for having recently joined the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland. Twice the state prosecuted the artist, first in 1920 for having satirized the German Army in his folio Gott mit Uns; threatened with imprisonment, he got off with a fine. Ecce Homo landed him in trouble a second time, on this occasion for obscenity. Again he and his publishers were judged guilty and paid up. Having been threatened on the street, Grosz obtained a license to carry a pistol for self-protection.
“I considered all art useless unless it could be employed as a political instrument in the battle for freedom”–this was Grosz’s view in 1918, right after the war. “My art was to be my arm, my sword. Pens that drew without a purpose were like empty straws” (ibid., pp. 162-163). He returned from his trip to the Soviet Union during the summer of 1922, however, disillusioned with the increasingly totalitarian system he observed there. In 1923 Grosz quit the KPD, but continued to immerse himself in the everyday drama being played out in the streets of Berlin, taking a more detached and sardonic view of all that he witnessed.
“I was really part and parcel of the life I was depicting,” Grosz admitted. “To view the world as a natural spectacle, as rationally explicable, seemed right and good to me... Since reading Nietzsche I was rather suspicious of the moral in man. The elements rain, wind, volcanic eruptions, snow and frost that nips people’s feet cannot be viewed as good or evil. Why then man? Because of this attitude, I could not be a reformer” (ibid., p. 172).
FIG:
George Grosz, Ecce Homo, 1921. Private collection.
“Barbarism prevailed... The times were certainly mad!” George Grosz wrote, describing the chaos in Germany following the nation’s humiliating defeat at the end of the First World War. “Morality as such no longer existed. A wave of prostitution and obscenity swept the land” (A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz, New York, 1946, p. 168). This watercolor illustrates a little corner in a society reeling from the ravages of mass unemployment and rampant inflation. “Everyone who had nothing wanted something,” Grosz observed, “and everyone who had something sold it for many times its value... The higher the scale of values, the greater the lust for living” (ibid., pp. 170 and 171).
While clients endlessly come and go, the drunk, cigar-chomping pimp at the table in this sleazy basement brothel can only curse his fate, that after so much crude exploitation on his part, he has actually gained little to show for it. He earlier appeared in a more upscale setting–or is he dreaming?–in Ecce Homo, 1921, the title work in Grosz’s book collection of 16 watercolors and 84 drawings, executed during the past seven years, which Malik-Verlag published at the end of 1922. The many extraordinary qualities of the present Orgie, from an insouciantly blasé scatological vignette to the artist’s superlative skill as a watercolorist, may have made this work a candidate for inclusion as well. Grosz perhaps concluded, however, that after already having awarded star billing to his dyspeptic pimp, and then having put him on the cover of the book, directly above the title–just as Pilate brought forth Christ and declared to the mob “Behold the Man”–he had given this fellow enough attention.
The tumultuous, even dangerous events that beset the fledgling Weimar Republic both challenged and inspired Grosz, not yet thirty, to create his very best work. During the brutal ultra-rightist, para-military suppression of the leftist Spartacist uprising in 1919, he narrowly avoided arrest and summary execution for having recently joined the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland. Twice the state prosecuted the artist, first in 1920 for having satirized the German Army in his folio Gott mit Uns; threatened with imprisonment, he got off with a fine. Ecce Homo landed him in trouble a second time, on this occasion for obscenity. Again he and his publishers were judged guilty and paid up. Having been threatened on the street, Grosz obtained a license to carry a pistol for self-protection.
“I considered all art useless unless it could be employed as a political instrument in the battle for freedom”–this was Grosz’s view in 1918, right after the war. “My art was to be my arm, my sword. Pens that drew without a purpose were like empty straws” (ibid., pp. 162-163). He returned from his trip to the Soviet Union during the summer of 1922, however, disillusioned with the increasingly totalitarian system he observed there. In 1923 Grosz quit the KPD, but continued to immerse himself in the everyday drama being played out in the streets of Berlin, taking a more detached and sardonic view of all that he witnessed.
“I was really part and parcel of the life I was depicting,” Grosz admitted. “To view the world as a natural spectacle, as rationally explicable, seemed right and good to me... Since reading Nietzsche I was rather suspicious of the moral in man. The elements rain, wind, volcanic eruptions, snow and frost that nips people’s feet cannot be viewed as good or evil. Why then man? Because of this attitude, I could not be a reformer” (ibid., p. 172).
FIG:
George Grosz, Ecce Homo, 1921. Private collection.