PBA Galleries

Ink and watercolor gouache. Approximately 60x46 cm (23½x18").

Signed and dated at upper right, titled in pencil at lower left. From the artist's Butcher Block series. Painted after his iconic Ecce Homo, the Butcher Block series portray similar themes in a softer manner. Common people go about their daily routines while in the background carcasses hang in the back of the butcher shop. Provenance: From the personal collection of Aaron Sopher,  (American 1905–1972) Baltimore, Maryland cartoonist. When Grosz immigrated to New York in 1933 he and Sopher become friends through their mutual social/political outlooks. Sopher is famous for portraying the hardship and devastation felt by the American people during the Depression.

George Grosz (German 1893-1959) is associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, along with Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. He was a member of the Berlin Dada group as well as associated with the German Expressionists. As a soldier in World War I Grosz witnessed the devastation of war which caused his art to tend towards social criticism and the decay of German society as he saw it. He was a leftist activist contributing drawings in satirical and critical periodicals. His art was labeled as degenerate by the Nazis and displayed in the famous The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” in Munich 1937 which was designed to foster outrage with the public against un-German, Jewish and Communist art. He immigrated to the US in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938.