Room 208.05

George Grosz’s body of work is among those to best represent the social conflicts of interwar Germany. During the initial period of his artistic output, his practice condemned all forms of deplorable behaviour related to abuses of power, both in war and everyday contexts, constituting a fierce tirade against the army, ecclesiastical power, the bourgeoisie and authority. For Ecce homo, the artist condensed much of his work, selecting drawings and watercolours made from 1915 to 1922 to reproduce them via photomechanical techniques which made possible the mass distribution of his most committed works. It also incurred the wrath of the authorities. The folder was published by the Malik Publishing House and became one of the biggest driving forces in Europe out of the markedly progressive writers of the time, such as Franz Jung, Iliá Ehrenburg, Georg Lukács and Upton Sinclair.  

Grosz dissected life in Berlin, which, for him, represented bourgeois society, capitalism and the disastrous consequences it occasioned. The city would become a setting that was shattered by the First World War, where splendour and misery would co-exist, and where the hustle and bustle of cafés and variety shows held sway. The artist would construct idiosyncratic imagery of grotesque characters, mixing and matching prostitutes, civil servants, the unemployed, war-wounded servicemen and different speculators, situating them on a stage of depravity ruled by social inequality, violence, desperation, lust and rage. The publication of this work had such grave social repercussions that the artist and its publishers went on trial in 1923 and 1924, with accusations of it containing numerous pieces which offended the “sense of shame and decency of a person with normal perceptions regarding sexuality”. Nevertheless, the court did not proceed which the prosecution’s demands that the whole portfolio be confiscated and destroyed and, as a result, the work has become a kind of documentary record of the evils afflicting Germany at that time.