Cover: Far in the South, Oh Beautiful Spain George Grosz 1919

Klaus Hegewisch, Hamburg

Grosz made erotic and pornographic representations of ordinary popular predilections. The erotic drawings in his own work are as little 'appealing' as his other drawings. They are revealing, literally and metaphorically; they reveal his views and attitudes of the participants, their play-acting and their myth-making. Far in the South, oh beautiful Spain shows Grosz's assembly of his figurines in a Futurist strip cartoon, a twentieth-century morality play. 

Berlin Dada events, those which have gone for ever and those publica­tions which remain, have been considered for their political as well as for their aesthetic relevance. Grosz himself was an active Dadaist, that is an insulting entertainer and conscious destroyer of artistic values. In his collages with Heartfield he produced striking destructions of accepted visual imagery, as much as he destroyed conventional ideas of beauty in his drawings. Dada was most meaningful as a symptom of disgust and revolt. 

Hans Hess – George Grosz 

Today's artist, if he does not want to run down and become an antiquated dud, has the choice between technology and class warfare propaganda. In both cases he must give up 'pure art.' Either he enrols as an architect, engineer or advertising artist in the army (unfortunately very feudalistically organized) which develops industrial powers and exploits the world; or, as a reporter and critic reflecting the face of our times, a propagandist and defender of the revolutionary idea and its partisans, he finds a place in the army of the suppressed who fight for their just share of the world, for a significant social organization of life.

 

George Grosz Art is in Danger 1925