George Grosz. 30 Drawings & Watercolors
New York: Paul L. Baruch, Inc., 1948. First edition. Hardcover. Small folio. 2, 30 plates. Original illustrated tan spiral-bound boards with original plastic cover sheet as issued, with George Grosz facsimile signature and black lettering on cover. Title page with facsimile signature of George Grosz. Collection of thirty drawings by George Grosz from 1915-1940. The collection contains numerous of his famous "line drawings," including the 1918 drawing "Our World," drawings with military subjects as well as the for Grosz typical subject, the interaction of rich and poor, and several drawings created after his immigration to the United States, representing his determination to change style and topics, including his turn towards Renaissance painting techniques. All reproductions in b/w.
"With his pedantic grounding, he emerged in the last years of peace as an habitué of a Berlin coffee-house popularly dubbed "Café Megalomania," where the Expressionists, Futurists and Cubists hung out. Penniless, he went dressed like a circus agent. His studio was an attic on the outskirts of town; its walls plastered with American advertisements, mystery-story covers, photographs of Edison and Mark Twain. An easel held a huge canvas, "Arrival in Manhattan." A phonograph incessantly played ragtime. Boxes crammed with drawings stood about. The moderns rejected his work as "naturalistic," the critics' guild because he couldn't draw. His technique was remotely akin to that of Paul Klee's abstract infantilism; only, he was more carnal in his conception and cruder in his selection of subjects: cheap cabarets, amusement parks, the "ant" piles of the metropolis and time and again the skyscrapers and Mid-Western farms of America, where he had never been..."(Mehring).
Plastic cover sheet and cover boards with some light sunning, back cover with some staining due to water influence, not wavy however. Ex-Libris attached to lower foredge corner over inside cover. Some light age-toning of plates along edges. Good- to very good condition. Item #56093
Price: $75.00