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.


From 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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

No artist's work gives off the acrid whiff of Berlin during the 1920s as unmistakably as the paintings, drawings and prints of George Grosz (1893-1959). They teem with the characters who gave the capital of the Weimar Republic its by turns dangerously seductive and repulsive face: the prostitutes and pimps, the beggars and black marketers, the scheming politicians, vengeful military and judiciary, the dissatisfied workers and self-important bourgeoisie. In Grosz's work we can follow, through at first politically committed but then increasingly disillusioned eyes, the course of Germany from defeat in the First World War through economic and political crisis to the rise and triumph of Fascism. Given Grosz's stature and the still-growing interest in modern German art, it is extraordinary that the exhibition at the Royal Academy will be the first in Britain since 1962. It will include about 150 of his finest works on paper and will show a number of major works never previously seen. The catalogue will also provide information, unfamiliar to a non-German audience, about a fascinating and complex artist: several of Grosz's key theoretical essays and most of his revealing letters have never been translated into English.

FROM THE CRITICS

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.