Berlin Streetscene

Title: Berlin Streetscene

Work: Watercolour

Artist： George Grosz （1893 - 1959）

Work Date: 1930

Materials: Watercolour, ink and Oil On Paper

Style: Expressionism

Size：h60 x w46 cm ( h23.6 x w18,1 in)

Collection: Private Collection

An elegant lady in heels and a fur collar haughtily curls her nose at a dapper gentleman who winks at her in a fashionable street. Only interested in their own flirtatious exchanges, they do not notice the old man in a threadbare suit beggung for money.

This watercolour scathingly caricatures the appalling social conditions of post-First World War Germany. A satire on the affected patriotism, selfish greed and depraved sensuality of the period, it is one of many which the artist produced that have a nightmarish quality.

Grosz's disgust at a decaying society of distorted morals, propaganda and self-indulgence led him to vent his anger through his biting satirical caricatures, and eventually to emigrate to the USA. His work gradually came to combine the satire of old with a new romanticism. He began his carrer as a caricaturist and became a leading member of the Dada group in Berlin after 1918.]

George Grosz (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural rawings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in 1933.