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Lot Essay
‘Day by day my hatred of Germany gains blazing new nourishment through the impossible ugly, unaesthetic, (oh yes!), bad, exceedingly bad, dress of its most German citizens…What I see since no more foreigners live in Germany: only unkempt, fat, deformed, ugly men and women (above all) degenerated (although a fat, red, flabby man counts here as a “governmental man”), with bad juices (from beer), with hips that are too fat and too short…It is an anguish that constantly renews itself, to be a seeing person living among all these stinking blind ones… - and with it, these people have absolute power: they force me to do their work, simply pulling me into their military service or else by having me shot. What strange notions of humanity. I ask myself: why have all the philosophers lived, who, as we learned in school, are the ones who “should lead us, the people (me?) forward”… God, these are great times, we thank you, oh Lord God - (please excuse me if I disturb you) - for being able to ...experience all this.’ (G. Grosz, ‘Letter to Robert Bell’, 1916-17, in H. Knust, ed. George Grosz, Briefe, 1913-1959, Hamburg, 1979, pp. 42-44).
Paar im Zimmer (Couple in a Room) is one of George Grosz’s earliest surviving oil paintings. It was painted in 1915 in the sprawling Berlin suburb of Südende – where Grosz had been living and working in an attic studio – and depicts the grim ennui of a local, garret brothel. An updated version of Edouard Manet’s and Paul Cezanne’s respective Olympias, Paar im Zimmer is one of the first of a highly important sequence of around thirty oil paintings that Grosz made between 1915 and 1918 in which he bitterly exposed the disastrous socio-political demise of Germany during the cataclysm of the First World War. Of this rare but great series of paintings, only twenty works are known to have survived the later purges of the Nazi era and, of these, the majority are held in museum collections including the Nationalgalerie Berlin; the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; the Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Grosz had begun painting in oil around November 1912 but not one of these very first works survives; the artist’s earliest extant oils date to 1915. Paar im Zimmer is one of five such pictures that Grosz made at this time, following his return to Berlin after being discharged from the army. Although deemed temporarily unfit for the military, he lived under the threat of an immediate recall. Bitter from his brief war experience and now firmly opposed to both the war and the Imperialist aims of a country he saw as manipulating the minds of the masses for its own ends, Grosz anglicised his name in protest (changing it from Georg Gross to George Grosz) and began to pour out his hatred in a series of increasingly acidic and highly perceptive images.
‘I had a blinkered hatred of the human race’, Grosz wrote around this time. ‘I saw everything from the viewpoint of my little attic studio. Downstairs and all around me were members of the petty bourgeoisie, landlords and small-business people, whose talk and ideas sickened me. And so I became a misanthrope, a sceptic and an individualist. Foolish and ill-educated as I was, I believed that I had a monopoly on wisdom and knowledge, and I took pride in my supposed ability to see through the stupidity that surrounded me. I started with drawings that expressed the mood of hatred I was in... In search of a style to reproduce the bleak lovelessness of my subjects as starkly uncompromisingly as possible, I studied the most direct utterances of the artistic instinct. I copied the folk drawings in urinals, because they seemed to me to convey strong feelings with the greatest economy and immediacy.’ (G. Grosz, ‘Abwicklung’ in George Grosz, exh. cat. Berlin, 1923).
These drawings gradually began to coalesce into a series of clear and oft-repeated themes which Grosz at one time intended to collate into a portfolio to be entitled ‘The Ugliness of the Germans’. Other drawings centred around a specific subject, which Grosz would work up through a series of studies, and would later use as the basis for his oil paintings. Paar im Zimmer marks, in this respect, the culmination of a series of drawings that Grosz made in 1915 on the theme of squalid domesticity and the often-violent relationship between a fat, ugly and brutal-looking proletarian man and an openly lascivious and usually naked woman. Many of these compositions depict horrific acts of violence and even murder, but in Paar in Zimmer he has taken a subtler approach: Here the violence is only implied. The strange combination of both garish and muted colours, and Grosz’s loving attention to the banal objects and artifacts of daily life (ranging from the perfume bottle to the chamber pot peeking out from beneath the bed), bestow the scene with a mundane atmosphere. At the same time, the stark contrast in mood between the two figures conveys a brooding and underlying sense of division and sexual discord. As Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius has written of this work, the relationship between the couple in the painting appears to be that of a prostitute with either her pimp, her client, or her landlord, yet this, and ‘whether intercourse, rape or even sex-murder is to be implied, remains unclear’ (K. Hoffmann-Curtius, Im Blickfeld John der Frauenmörder von George Grosz, Hamburg, 1993 p. 44).
Hoffmann-Curtius has also drawn a comparison between Paar im Zimmer and Frida Kahlo’s 1935 painting Unos Quantos Piquetitos (A Few Small Nips). But, with its echoes of the more contemporaneous work of artists like Jules Pascin and even Walter Richard Sickert’s celebrated Camden Town paintings, what Grosz is really presenting is a more generic if also gruesomely misanthropic take on the modern nude. Like Manet and Cézanne before him, Paar im Zimmer, with its ugly nude and emaciated little dog asleep at the foot of the bed is Grosz’s image of the modern Olympia, rendered here as one might have encountered her in the wartime Berlin suburb of Südende.
Paar im Zimmer (Couple in a Room) is one of George Grosz’s earliest surviving oil paintings. It was painted in 1915 in the sprawling Berlin suburb of Südende – where Grosz had been living and working in an attic studio – and depicts the grim ennui of a local, garret brothel. An updated version of Edouard Manet’s and Paul Cezanne’s respective Olympias, Paar im Zimmer is one of the first of a highly important sequence of around thirty oil paintings that Grosz made between 1915 and 1918 in which he bitterly exposed the disastrous socio-political demise of Germany during the cataclysm of the First World War. Of this rare but great series of paintings, only twenty works are known to have survived the later purges of the Nazi era and, of these, the majority are held in museum collections including the Nationalgalerie Berlin; the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; the Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Grosz had begun painting in oil around November 1912 but not one of these very first works survives; the artist’s earliest extant oils date to 1915. Paar im Zimmer is one of five such pictures that Grosz made at this time, following his return to Berlin after being discharged from the army. Although deemed temporarily unfit for the military, he lived under the threat of an immediate recall. Bitter from his brief war experience and now firmly opposed to both the war and the Imperialist aims of a country he saw as manipulating the minds of the masses for its own ends, Grosz anglicised his name in protest (changing it from Georg Gross to George Grosz) and began to pour out his hatred in a series of increasingly acidic and highly perceptive images.
‘I had a blinkered hatred of the human race’, Grosz wrote around this time. ‘I saw everything from the viewpoint of my little attic studio. Downstairs and all around me were members of the petty bourgeoisie, landlords and small-business people, whose talk and ideas sickened me. And so I became a misanthrope, a sceptic and an individualist. Foolish and ill-educated as I was, I believed that I had a monopoly on wisdom and knowledge, and I took pride in my supposed ability to see through the stupidity that surrounded me. I started with drawings that expressed the mood of hatred I was in... In search of a style to reproduce the bleak lovelessness of my subjects as starkly uncompromisingly as possible, I studied the most direct utterances of the artistic instinct. I copied the folk drawings in urinals, because they seemed to me to convey strong feelings with the greatest economy and immediacy.’ (G. Grosz, ‘Abwicklung’ in George Grosz, exh. cat. Berlin, 1923).
These drawings gradually began to coalesce into a series of clear and oft-repeated themes which Grosz at one time intended to collate into a portfolio to be entitled ‘The Ugliness of the Germans’. Other drawings centred around a specific subject, which Grosz would work up through a series of studies, and would later use as the basis for his oil paintings. Paar im Zimmer marks, in this respect, the culmination of a series of drawings that Grosz made in 1915 on the theme of squalid domesticity and the often-violent relationship between a fat, ugly and brutal-looking proletarian man and an openly lascivious and usually naked woman. Many of these compositions depict horrific acts of violence and even murder, but in Paar in Zimmer he has taken a subtler approach: Here the violence is only implied. The strange combination of both garish and muted colours, and Grosz’s loving attention to the banal objects and artifacts of daily life (ranging from the perfume bottle to the chamber pot peeking out from beneath the bed), bestow the scene with a mundane atmosphere. At the same time, the stark contrast in mood between the two figures conveys a brooding and underlying sense of division and sexual discord. As Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius has written of this work, the relationship between the couple in the painting appears to be that of a prostitute with either her pimp, her client, or her landlord, yet this, and ‘whether intercourse, rape or even sex-murder is to be implied, remains unclear’ (K. Hoffmann-Curtius, Im Blickfeld John der Frauenmörder von George Grosz, Hamburg, 1993 p. 44).
Hoffmann-Curtius has also drawn a comparison between Paar im Zimmer and Frida Kahlo’s 1935 painting Unos Quantos Piquetitos (A Few Small Nips). But, with its echoes of the more contemporaneous work of artists like Jules Pascin and even Walter Richard Sickert’s celebrated Camden Town paintings, what Grosz is really presenting is a more generic if also gruesomely misanthropic take on the modern nude. Like Manet and Cézanne before him, Paar im Zimmer, with its ugly nude and emaciated little dog asleep at the foot of the bed is Grosz’s image of the modern Olympia, rendered here as one might have encountered her in the wartime Berlin suburb of Südende.