George Grosz
American, born Germany, 1893 - 1959Der Hypochonder Otto Schmalhausen (The Hypochondriac Otto Schmalhausen), 1922
Not on view
Lithograph on paper
Dimensions14 1/4 × 10 1/2 in. (36.2 × 26.7 cm)
Image: 11 7/8 × 8 7/16 in. (30.2 × 21.4 cm)
Gift of Mr. William E. Voldrich, 1984.10.1
The subject of this lithograph is fellow German Dada artist Otto Schmalhausen who is depicted as a frail and aging artist. Grosz places Schmalhausen in a compact space that displays his many ailments and treatment methods which are scattered across the floor in piles.
The painter and caricaturist George Grosz was born in Berlin in 1893. He received his academic training at the Royal Saxon Academy of Fine Arts between 1909 and 1911. Grosz developed an early affiliation with the German Expressionists who distorted reality in order to express their inner vision or emotions. While serving in the German infantry (1914-16), Grosz produced a series of violently satiric drawings of the military that gained him considerable notoriety. In 1918, Grosz joined the German Dada movement and over the next fourteen years produced an extensive body of work, chronicling the moral decay of postwar Germany. Grosz was arrested three times during the 1920s following the publication of portfolios like Ecco Homo, from which Der Hypochonder Otto Schmalhausen comes. Grosz's position was increasingly threatened by the rise of Nazism, so in 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach at the Art Students League and moved to New York.
