In 1912 the young art student Grosz moved from Dresden to Berlin. It was here that he created many of his important early works; first of all works on paper and from 1915 paintings. In this year Grosz developed his ‘razor-sharp style’. He drew cityscapes and street scenes with recurring details, as we can see in this drawing. It is a scene of the nocturnal and bizarre comings and goings in the metropolis with a motley selection of grotesque, hurrying people with a tram, horse and carriage and hearse in their midst. With the exception of a mother and child, everyone is out and about on their own, wrapped up in themselves and their own wishes, greed and sinister thoughts. All this is surrounded by Berlin’s typical city architecture: a sleazy hotel on the left, at the top right six- and seven-storey apartment blocks, which can often be found in Berlin, and in the background, on the outskirts of the city, factories with chimneys belching smoke. A train speeds through the picture on an elevated track and in the sky we can see a solitary plane, a scattering of stars and a sickle moon, which the artist humorously gave a pipe. A dolled up cocotte dominates the centre of the picture and some grotesque characters are sidling and loitering around her – perhaps one of them is the potential murderer of women, who starts committing his crimes in the pictures of 1918. A sailor smoking a pipe is walking along, holding a model of a flagged imperial warship. At the bottom left a man wearing a bowler hat is walking out of the picture, probably the artist himself who is leaving this eerie and chilling scene behind him.

Ralph Jentsch

Literatur: Serge Sabarsky: George Grosz. Die Berliner Jahre. Ausstellungskatalog Hamburger Kunsthalle. April – Juni 1986, vgl. Abbildung Tafel 56.