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拍品专文
Ralph Jentsch has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
‘As the great English satirist George Orwell puts it in his new book, 1984, "War is Peace – Freedom is Slavery – Ignorance is Strength"... Efforts are being made to extinguish the past absolutely (as Orwell rightly says) by applying the sinister totalitarian laws of a grey present’ (George Grosz, Letter to Otto Schmalhausen, 20 June 1949, in H. Knust, ed. George Grosz, Briefe 1913-1959, Hamburg 1979, p. 432).
Depicting a procession of angry grey figures marching fanatically behind a rainbow-coloured effigy in the shape of a man and studded with nails, Marching Stickmen is an outstanding example from the Stickmen series of paintings that George Grosz made in America, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This important series of pictures was Grosz’s last major, socio-critical body of work. Created as news of the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb and the rise of the Cold War dominated the international media, this series was directed against the evils of totalitarianism that Grosz saw rising all around him and took the form of a sequence of terrifying images of a grey, impersonalized world of utter hopelessness and desolation. Concentrating on a de-individualized, dehumanized, collective mass, Grosz’s 'Stickmen' pictures express a vision of the future as a desolate wasteland where the individual has been destroyed and man has been reduced to an empty vessel unable to think for himself. As can be seen in this work, the grey, hollow heads of this ignorant and unthinking mob are only enlivened by their rabid eyes burning full of fear and hatred of anything unlike themselves. These are men who can only see what they have been told to see. Their ears and mouths are often also shown as sewn or bolted shut.
Echoing Alberto Giacometti’s images of post-war man and prefiguring George Orwell’s famous dystopian vision of the future, first published in 1948, Grosz’s Stickmen derived in part from Grosz’s fondness for Franz Kafka’s story Metamorphosis and the notion of a man who one day wakes up to find he has become an insect. Echoing this sentiment to some extent, Grosz’s insect-like ‘Stickmen’ present a world where man has become nothing more than an automaton, a numbered cog in a totalitarian machine. These paintings were first exhibited as a group in New York in April 1948 were a statement on them read: 'The Stick Men are men who are called by numbers and not by names,' they are 'men who wear slave collars – grey men in a grey world following empty meaningless banners' (Exhibition invitation to George Grosz, The Stick Men, The Associated American Artists, New York, April 1948).
Executed in 1947, Marching Stickmen depicts a Zombie-like parade of Grey Stickmen marching in unison behind the image of a rainbow-coloured banner in the form of a figure impaled on a spike. Their eyes ablaze with fiery, fury, these 'Enemies of the Rainbow' – as another of these paintings is entitled – are angry at the invasion of colour into the collectivity of their grey world. Long a symbol of diversity and union – and one later adopted as such by the peace movement and the LGBT+ community – the Rainbow Flag was, since it was first founded in Essen in 1922, the emblem of the International Co-operative Alliance. Such concepts of individualism, diversity and of union – of a cross-border co-operative of working individuals – clearly has no-place, this painting announces, in the grey, anonymous, collectivism of the 'Stickmen'.
‘As the great English satirist George Orwell puts it in his new book, 1984, "War is Peace – Freedom is Slavery – Ignorance is Strength"... Efforts are being made to extinguish the past absolutely (as Orwell rightly says) by applying the sinister totalitarian laws of a grey present’ (George Grosz, Letter to Otto Schmalhausen, 20 June 1949, in H. Knust, ed. George Grosz, Briefe 1913-1959, Hamburg 1979, p. 432).
Depicting a procession of angry grey figures marching fanatically behind a rainbow-coloured effigy in the shape of a man and studded with nails, Marching Stickmen is an outstanding example from the Stickmen series of paintings that George Grosz made in America, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This important series of pictures was Grosz’s last major, socio-critical body of work. Created as news of the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb and the rise of the Cold War dominated the international media, this series was directed against the evils of totalitarianism that Grosz saw rising all around him and took the form of a sequence of terrifying images of a grey, impersonalized world of utter hopelessness and desolation. Concentrating on a de-individualized, dehumanized, collective mass, Grosz’s 'Stickmen' pictures express a vision of the future as a desolate wasteland where the individual has been destroyed and man has been reduced to an empty vessel unable to think for himself. As can be seen in this work, the grey, hollow heads of this ignorant and unthinking mob are only enlivened by their rabid eyes burning full of fear and hatred of anything unlike themselves. These are men who can only see what they have been told to see. Their ears and mouths are often also shown as sewn or bolted shut.
Echoing Alberto Giacometti’s images of post-war man and prefiguring George Orwell’s famous dystopian vision of the future, first published in 1948, Grosz’s Stickmen derived in part from Grosz’s fondness for Franz Kafka’s story Metamorphosis and the notion of a man who one day wakes up to find he has become an insect. Echoing this sentiment to some extent, Grosz’s insect-like ‘Stickmen’ present a world where man has become nothing more than an automaton, a numbered cog in a totalitarian machine. These paintings were first exhibited as a group in New York in April 1948 were a statement on them read: 'The Stick Men are men who are called by numbers and not by names,' they are 'men who wear slave collars – grey men in a grey world following empty meaningless banners' (Exhibition invitation to George Grosz, The Stick Men, The Associated American Artists, New York, April 1948).
Executed in 1947, Marching Stickmen depicts a Zombie-like parade of Grey Stickmen marching in unison behind the image of a rainbow-coloured banner in the form of a figure impaled on a spike. Their eyes ablaze with fiery, fury, these 'Enemies of the Rainbow' – as another of these paintings is entitled – are angry at the invasion of colour into the collectivity of their grey world. Long a symbol of diversity and union – and one later adopted as such by the peace movement and the LGBT+ community – the Rainbow Flag was, since it was first founded in Essen in 1922, the emblem of the International Co-operative Alliance. Such concepts of individualism, diversity and of union – of a cross-border co-operative of working individuals – clearly has no-place, this painting announces, in the grey, anonymous, collectivism of the 'Stickmen'.