George Grosz (1893-1959)

Ralph Jentsch has confirmed the authenticity of this work.




Centred on the image of a grotesque, drunken, cigar-smoking, pig-like man spewing wine through his rotten teeth onto his dinner plate, this watercolour is a bitter and powerful expression of the complete state of collapse into which Germany had fallen in the years following the First World War. It forms part of a long series of drawings and watercolours by Grosz that captured and detailed the unique and spectacularly ugly social conditions of his native Berlin during these years of failed revolution, inflation, desperation, debauchery and financial ruin - many of which ended up in his tendentious and immediately-banned 1923 portfolio, ironically entitled Ecce Homo (Behold the Man!).

A metaphor for Germany and mankind as a whole, this picture depicts all of Man's baser instincts with regards to pleasuring himself through the conceit of a small-time bar. The bar of gangsters or the regulars table is one of Grosz's favourite and most repeated themes. This bar-room scene, revolving around the gruesome central figure at the table captures, in an almost cinematic sequence of events reading clockwise from the right, people copulating, drinking themselves sick, defecating and leaving all within one condensed square space.

Rendered in the crude 'knife-hard' drawing style Grosz had developed from copying children's drawings and urinal graffiti, but with a bitter accuracy and sharpness of observation that is unsurpassed in modern art, Grosz's stylized forms carry within them the brutal and undeniable ring of truth. Coordinated into a pictorial unity in this work by his masterful use of harsh clashing acidic colours bleeding into one another to heighten the garish intensity of the scene, the bestial sequence of acts depicted here are also underpinned and united by a pervasive black humour.