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Lot Essay
'Even mid-war,... [Die Weissen Blätter]...printed poems and articles of enemy foreigners; we got acquainted with Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland. (It) published one of the best stories of the then still unknown Leonhard Frank (Der Vater) and discovered Franz Kafka (Die Verwandlung). They discovered me too.' (George Grosz, An Autobiography, trans. by Nora Hodges, London, 1998, pp. 100-101).
With its distinctive image of a group of intellectuals seated against an unwelcoming, if not hostile, backdrop of aristocratic and military personnel, prison buildings and a church, each sporting the nationalist flag, Liebe Clarté is a work that depicts the stark political and ideological divide of Germany in 1922. Its title refers to the Clarté group a 'League of Intellectual Solidarity for the Triumph of the International Cause' founded by Henri Barbusse, author of the celebrated anti-war novel Le Feu, in the aftermath of the Great War.
'There are but two nations in the world' Barbusse declared, 'that of the exploiters and that of the exploited. The more powerful is the prisoner of the other, and we all belong, proletarians of battles, to the one that is vanquished. Such is the tragic, mad, shameful reality. All the rest is but foul superannuated sophisms which will bring the worlds end by mere force of absurdity if slaves remain slaves' (Henri Barbusse quoted in Max Eastman, 'The Clarté Movement', in The Liberator, vol. 3, No 4, April 1920, pp. 40-42).
Associated members of Clarté included such luminaries as Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel, Thomas Hardy, Rene Schickele, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells, Stefan Zweig. George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, and Leonhard Frank. Leonhard Frank is depicted near the centre of this work, with his well-known declaration 'Man is Good' seemingly tattooed across his cranium.
Executed in the year that Grosz made his demoralising investigative journey to Soviet Russia, the drawing is partially a tribute to the international collective of Left-wing intellectuals and partially an indictment of their fragile predicament in a world where man was still proving himself to be pretty far from good.
With its distinctive image of a group of intellectuals seated against an unwelcoming, if not hostile, backdrop of aristocratic and military personnel, prison buildings and a church, each sporting the nationalist flag, Liebe Clarté is a work that depicts the stark political and ideological divide of Germany in 1922. Its title refers to the Clarté group a 'League of Intellectual Solidarity for the Triumph of the International Cause' founded by Henri Barbusse, author of the celebrated anti-war novel Le Feu, in the aftermath of the Great War.
'There are but two nations in the world' Barbusse declared, 'that of the exploiters and that of the exploited. The more powerful is the prisoner of the other, and we all belong, proletarians of battles, to the one that is vanquished. Such is the tragic, mad, shameful reality. All the rest is but foul superannuated sophisms which will bring the worlds end by mere force of absurdity if slaves remain slaves' (Henri Barbusse quoted in Max Eastman, 'The Clarté Movement', in The Liberator, vol. 3, No 4, April 1920, pp. 40-42).
Associated members of Clarté included such luminaries as Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel, Thomas Hardy, Rene Schickele, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells, Stefan Zweig. George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, and Leonhard Frank. Leonhard Frank is depicted near the centre of this work, with his well-known declaration 'Man is Good' seemingly tattooed across his cranium.
Executed in the year that Grosz made his demoralising investigative journey to Soviet Russia, the drawing is partially a tribute to the international collective of Left-wing intellectuals and partially an indictment of their fragile predicament in a world where man was still proving himself to be pretty far from good.