PORTLAND, MAINE.- With a generous gift from Eva and David Bradford, the Portland Museum of Art is poised to present an on-going series of exhibitions devoted to German prints of the early 20th century. The first such exhibition focuses on the artist George Grosz and his political interest in printed media, specifically more than 20 photolithographic facsimiles of his drawings, a medium which allowed a large number of people to see his work rather than an elite few. Prints by George Grosz: A Scathing Portrait of Weimar Germany will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art from March 1 through May 11, 2003.
Works in this exhibition date primarily to the years just after World War I, when the Weimar Republic (1919-1933)—named after the town in which the constitution of the new government was adopted—was newly established. The prints call attention in powerful, often shocking, fashion to the abuses and hypocrisy of life in Germany during the Weimar era, a period characterized by social, political, and economic turbulence and corruption. Grosz’s images collectively expose and attack all levels of "the establishment"—from rich capitalists to the militia to the middle class. For example, nine lithographs in this exhibition comprise the 1922 portfolio entitled The Robbers, which seeks to reveal the predatory nature of capitalism, portraying wealthy business owners as profiting from the suffering of humanity. Such a renewed interest in portraying an unsentimentalized reality has been labeled the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).
Grosz was born in Berlin in 1893 but became an American citizen in 1938, having first arrived in the United States in 1932. His anti-war images, created over several decades, are some of the most powerful of the era, and it is noteworthy that Grosz was among the first to use art to criticize Adolf Hitler, condemning him as early as 1925. His artistic vision was defined early on—"… I was rebellious and tried to use my art to convince the world of its ugliness, sickness and hypocrisy." In 1919 Grosz was a leading figure in Berlin’s Dada movement, which sought to shock the public out of its complacent, unquestioning existence, a goal from which Grosz never seemed to stray very far. The prints in the exhibition clearly reflect this stance, and still decades later, in 1946, he would write that "What mattered was to stir up the deep darkness."