Mick Hartley

Unmistakeably George Grosz:

From the British Museum's exhibition of modern drawings from their collection, Picasso to Julie Mehretu. Click to enlarge.

For me the highlights are the Germans: EL Kirchner, Otto Dix….and Grosz here. Was there ever a more savage take on the German bourgeoisie of the Weimar Republic? Though here we're  still in the Great War of course, and Grosz was only just back in Berlin after having been discharged from military service – managing, by his own account, only narrowly to escape being shot for desertion, though Wikipedia has him being discharged as unfit.

According to the BM description this is "a kaleidoscopic view of metropolitan vice", with a couple of self-portraits bottom left.

There are more Grosz cafe scenes here, including some where the vice is a little more explicit.

"My drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. . . . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands. . . . I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket. . . I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty.”

After emigrating to the US in 1933 he turned mellow as a pussycat, which only goes to show….well, I'm sure it shows something. He even wrote a rather good autobiography, "A Small Yes and a Big No".

The exhibition's free, on till the end of April.