拍品专文
‘My art was to be a sword and a gun; I considered my pencils as nothing but straws unless they served the battle for freedom... My feelings were realized in a large, political painting which I called Germany a Winter’s Tale after an epic by Heinrich Heine. At the centre sat the eternal German bourgeois, fat and frightened at a slightly unsteady table with the morning paper and a cigar. Below, the three pillars of society: Army, Church, and School.... The bourgeois holds tightly to his knife and fork, as the world sways about him. A sailor, symbolizing the revolution, and a prostitute competed my personal image of the times’ (George Grosz, An Autobiography, Berkeley, 1998 pp. 113-4).
Only recently rediscovered, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen (Germany, A Winter’s Tale) is one of George Grosz’s most important works. Executed in 1918 this stark and darkly humorous watercolour is, as the artist’s handwritten caption beneath it states, a fully realized study for his large oil painting of the same name. This oil, which is now lost, formed the centre-piece of the International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 was, Grosz claimed, his ‘most important painting’ (in ‘Kurzer Abriss’ in Situation1924, Künstlerische und kulturelle Manifestationen, Ulm, 1924, p. 22).
The largest and most ambitious of all Grosz’s paintings on the subject of Germany’s descent into chaos during this period, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen was one of three major oil paintings that Grosz painted in 1918 and dedicated to authors whose work he admired. The title refers to Heinrich Heine’s banned 1844 satirical verse epic of the same name in which the formerly exiled poet had satirized Germany’s nationalist aims and Prussian-orientated militarism. The two other authors to whom Grosz dedicated his paintings of contemporary Berlin life were Edgar Allen Poe and Oskar Panizza.
Grosz’s aim in painting Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen was to provide a true and revealing portrait of the hypocritical and broken nature of contemporary German society in a way which, as his friend and patron Harry Graf Kessler noted in his diary at this time, the artist hoped would one day be hung up in schools to ‘improve and reform’.
This colour-saturated watercolour study for the great and now sadly lost masterpiece, contains all the central figures and elements of the oil save that of the figure of the sailor which Grosz evidently introduced near the point of completing the oil in November 1918 as a response to the recent outbreak of the German revolution in the docks of Wilhelmshaven. Painted, presumably before he began to work on the oil version in August 1918, this watercolour lays out the perspectival structure of the oil painting in a sequence of ink-drawn rectangles while the bottom is anchored by the figures of the three ‘pillars of society’ (the decadent preacher, ferocious militarist and myopic teacher) who would adorn the later oil, though Grosz’s angry self-portrait visible in the bottom left hand corner of the oil is here absent.
Prior to its recent rediscovery amongst the personal belongings of Dr Hans Koch, a Dusseldorf doctor of medicine and well-known patron and collector of contemporary German art who had been the first to acquire the work from Hans Goltz’s gallery in Munich in 1920, this watercolour was thought to have been among the many major works by Grosz to be now lost. In 2011 it formed the centerpiece of an exhibition built around it and held at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. Prior to this exhibition, the work was last seen in public in 1922 at an exhibition of Grosz’s work held at the Galerie von Garvens in Hanover at the request of Herbert von Garvens who wanted to present it alongside the great oil to which it relates.
Only recently rediscovered, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen (Germany, A Winter’s Tale) is one of George Grosz’s most important works. Executed in 1918 this stark and darkly humorous watercolour is, as the artist’s handwritten caption beneath it states, a fully realized study for his large oil painting of the same name. This oil, which is now lost, formed the centre-piece of the International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 was, Grosz claimed, his ‘most important painting’ (in ‘Kurzer Abriss’ in Situation1924, Künstlerische und kulturelle Manifestationen, Ulm, 1924, p. 22).
The largest and most ambitious of all Grosz’s paintings on the subject of Germany’s descent into chaos during this period, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen was one of three major oil paintings that Grosz painted in 1918 and dedicated to authors whose work he admired. The title refers to Heinrich Heine’s banned 1844 satirical verse epic of the same name in which the formerly exiled poet had satirized Germany’s nationalist aims and Prussian-orientated militarism. The two other authors to whom Grosz dedicated his paintings of contemporary Berlin life were Edgar Allen Poe and Oskar Panizza.
Grosz’s aim in painting Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen was to provide a true and revealing portrait of the hypocritical and broken nature of contemporary German society in a way which, as his friend and patron Harry Graf Kessler noted in his diary at this time, the artist hoped would one day be hung up in schools to ‘improve and reform’.
This colour-saturated watercolour study for the great and now sadly lost masterpiece, contains all the central figures and elements of the oil save that of the figure of the sailor which Grosz evidently introduced near the point of completing the oil in November 1918 as a response to the recent outbreak of the German revolution in the docks of Wilhelmshaven. Painted, presumably before he began to work on the oil version in August 1918, this watercolour lays out the perspectival structure of the oil painting in a sequence of ink-drawn rectangles while the bottom is anchored by the figures of the three ‘pillars of society’ (the decadent preacher, ferocious militarist and myopic teacher) who would adorn the later oil, though Grosz’s angry self-portrait visible in the bottom left hand corner of the oil is here absent.
Prior to its recent rediscovery amongst the personal belongings of Dr Hans Koch, a Dusseldorf doctor of medicine and well-known patron and collector of contemporary German art who had been the first to acquire the work from Hans Goltz’s gallery in Munich in 1920, this watercolour was thought to have been among the many major works by Grosz to be now lost. In 2011 it formed the centerpiece of an exhibition built around it and held at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. Prior to this exhibition, the work was last seen in public in 1922 at an exhibition of Grosz’s work held at the Galerie von Garvens in Hanover at the request of Herbert von Garvens who wanted to present it alongside the great oil to which it relates.