Exploring the Provocative Art of George Grosz
- Sep 22, 2025
- 5 min read
George Grosz (1893-1959) was born in Berlin but as a committed anti-fascist he emigrated to the USA in the early 1930s, shortly before the Nazis came to power in Germany. In his adoptive country he taught art classes in New York, while regularly exhibiting his own work. But while the art that he made in the forties and fifties was admirable, it had nothing like the bite of the pictures that he made as an avant-garde critic of the Weimar Republic’s vices and its social degradation.
Grosz attacked what he saw as the hypocrisy of bourgeois behaviour using a modernist pictorial language and displaying a scabrous and earthy wit, provocations that landed him in trouble with the authorities on more than one occasion. I am drawn to his work for the courage he showed in depicting the iniquities prevalent in Berlin society at the time and for his denunciations of those he judged responsible. The same demimonde milieu is depicted in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, which was later adapted into the musical show and movie Cabaret, but Grosz’s art manages to gives us, I think, a more hard-hitting and less sanitised account of the villainous times he survived, with artistic expressiveness that amounts to more than entertainment or straightforward polemic.
Berlin nightlife in this period, as experienced in its bars and clubs, its brothels, and numerous other disreputable dives, was extremely permissive and its habitués seemed to revel in what must have seemed like an end-of-days debauchery. As Frank Whitford describes it:
Such establishments did much to establish Berlin’s international reputation as the bawdiest, most licentious city in Europe. Its cabaret acts were outrageously explicit. Its brothels were well publicized. The tables in its dance halls were furnished with telephones to permit assignations between customers who had never met. In its clubs, pubs and doorways girls, rent boys and entire pharmacopeias of drugs, especially cocaine, could be had for less than the price of a decent dinner. (The Berlin of George Grosz, Drawings, Watercolours and Prints 1912-1930 by Frank Whitford)
Grosz depicted this dissolute behaviour in a series of works which were collected and published as photolithographs under the title, Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) and Beauty was amongst these. Copies were confiscated and Grosz was prosecuted for indecency, largely on the basis that he had depicted his figures’ pubic hair. He defended himself arguing that the images he made were not fantasies – he depicted life as lived. As he put it: ‘My drawings and paintings were done as an act of protest; I was trying by means of my work to convince the world that it is ugly, sick and hypocritical.’ Grosz’s protests were not prudish criticisms of libertinism – they were instead intended to metaphorize the political bankruptcy of the period. At a time when hyperinflation was rendering money useless, when unemployment and crushing poverty prompted so many to beg for food on the streets and when extremist political groups were vying for ascendency, the degeneracy, greed, cruelty, and indifference of the elites of Berlin society seemed intolerable to Grosz.
In Beauty, Thee I Praise, a prostitute is foregrounded, naked save for her stockings, neck ribbon (reminiscent of Manet’s Olympia), stole and bright red hat. It is this hat that signposts her sexual availability and gestures an indulgence in lechery, from the middle of the scene. It is a hat which tops off the similarly ginger-red hair of the woman wearing it and which has a nipple-like button on top, mirroring the real one shown on her exposed breast. Her face, shown in profile as a parody of an elegant cameo, is hard, her teeth bared in a travesty of a smile, her makeup lurid with her smudged lipstick staining her teeth. Her right arm reaches to straighten the stole in a masquerade of demureness while in her left hand her disproportionately tiny fingers, clearly incapable of doing much else, hold a cigarette. A few lines drawn on her backside suggest skin creases, the ravages of a too long spent in turning tricks, and the ageing that her facial cosmetics have done little to disguise – that red blusher has been applied clumsily and sits awkwardly too high on her cheek and looks more like an injury. The pallor of her body, made stark under the garish light, is sickly rather than seductive and the exposed pudenda betokens desperation when any more coquettish display has become inadequate for the promotion of business.
She sits at a table whose Fauvist-like distorted perspective tilts a view of it towards us and shows it bearing a small wine glass and cup and saucer as well as a card of some kind; possibly a carte de visite or some kind of notebook in which to record assignations. Behind her sit three bald-headed patrons. To the rear, wearing a stiff collar and a monocle, the opaqueness of which is a gibe at the ruling classes’ blindness – a ramrod-backed Prussian type, typical of the former officer class now running the country, sits waiting his turn, his expression one of implacable forbearance and grim concupiscence as his gaze is directed towards the prostitute and those in front of him. In the middle ground, his eyes shut or squinting, his face and nose smirched red (rubbed off lipstick?), a coarser figure, insensate from drink, seems barely conscious, his hairy hands denoting a boorish, not to say bestial, lack of refinement.
Closest to the ‘beauty’, and casting her a sidelong furtive look, a blue-suited ‘respectable’ bourgeois figure, his body and bull neck perhaps fattened on the misery of others, sits first in the queue. His jutting jaw, protruding lips and smart dress combine to connote an entitlement and male authority that is made to seem particularly sleazy and gross in this environment. In the top right corner, we see a view to the outside world, a nighttime city scene of apartment blocks and a factory chimney, an evening in which an occluded moon no longer shines. In the far background stands another prostitute glancing over her shoulder. Her face is especially ghoulish, and like the foreground figure’s, made ugly by her trade, but also more forlorn through apparent pitiable rejection.
The title of the painting is heavily ironic; what stands for beauty in this scene is anything but and the evident sleaziness of it is equated not just to personal prurience but to political sordidness and cant. These customers are representative of types who masquerade as legitimate authority figures by day but whose nighttime animal habits betray them for what they are. They themselves, together with their hosts, have uglified beauty.
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