The New York Times Book Review, Ted Loos
Few artists have truly defined an era. George Grosz, the great truth-teller of Weimar Germany and the early Nazi years, came as close as any.... Though full of dark humor, many of the images retain their power to shock.
Kirkus Reviews
This volume demonstrates how brilliantly Grosz caught the life, and more importantly the feverish imagination, of a city and a nation in a particularly turbulent time. Marrying the jumpy lines and figural distortions of cubism to narrative subjects and an angry sense of morality, he illuminated the tawdry, often violent, lives of Berlin's down-and-out, its powerbrokers, and its murderers, during the chaotic Weimar years of the 1920s, in corrosive, unsettling, kinetic images. The drawings and prints of drunken prostitutes and their leering customers, calm murderers inspecting the bodies of their victims, fat businessmen and their voluptuous mistresses, prim bourgeoisie and exhausted workers, and mutilated ex-soldiers, are complemented here by some of Grosz's less familiar, and equally disturbing, watercolors. Whitford, a former lecturer in art history at Cambridge, provides a useful introduction to Grosz's life and times, and detailed and very helpful annotations to the artwork. A superb overview of a unique career. (139 b&w and 54 color illustrations) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
No other artist`s work depicts Berlin of the 1920s as unmistakably as the paintings, drawings, and prints of Grosz. This book presents about 150 of Grosz`s finest works on paper. It also provides fascinating information about the artist, including several of his key theoretical essays and many revealing letters that are here translated into English for the first time.
