GEORGE GROSZ

‘GERMANY, A WINTER’S TALE’ – WATERCOLOURS, SKETCHES, COLLAGES 1908–1958

George Grosz (1893–1959) was one of the leading figures in the Berlin Dada movement in the wake of the First World War. He was a sketcher, painter, illustrator, caricaturist and author. His biting political and socially critical satire unveiled the human face of an era caught between two global catastrophes, and played adefining role in shaping the visual culture of the Weimar Republic.

Grosz was a brilliant illustrator: he was able to hold up a magnifying glass to a person and capture what was characteristic about them. He emigrated to the United States in early 1933, just before the National Socialists seized power. In the summer of 1959, he returned to Berlin, where he died just a few weeks later.

The title of the exhibition is both a quotation from the famous poem by Heinrich Heine from 1844 and also a reference to a major work by Grosz from 1918, which is now lost. The most important piece in the exhibition is the ‘Winter’s Tale’ watercolour, which was created in the same year and was shown as a study for the lost painting at Garvens art dealership in Hanover as early as 1922. The watercolour, which lays out all the major motifs, was also thought to be missing until recently. It is now being exhibited once again in Hanover for the first time in ninety years.

The exhibition focuses on three significant parts of Grosz’s oeuvre – his sketches, watercolours and collages – and is complemented in Hanover by the painting Varieté(1918), which is part of the Stiftung Bernhard Sprengel. The high-quality selection of eighty works includes pieces that have never before been shown or published, and spans five decades. It offers a retrospective look at the impressive variety of themes Grosz dealt with from the beginnings of his artistic career until his later years.