George Grosz (American, born Germany, 1893-1959). For German Right and German Morals (Für Deutsches Recht und Deutsche Sitte), 1919. Lithograph, Sheet: 25 1/16 x 18 5/8 in. (63.7 x 47.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. F. H. Hirschland, 55.165.143

Cynicism and disillusionment with the government and militarism permeates the work of George Grosz, an incisive caricaturist, satirist, and one of the most influential graphic artists to be associated with Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Dada. An ardent communist and supporter of the working class, Grosz expressed his disdain for the right wing capitalist and military ruling classes in a caustic portfolio of lithographs he made after WWI ironically titled God With Us after the nationalistic motto inscribed on every German soldier’s belt buckle. The print For German Right and German Morals (German Soldiers to the Front) (55.165.143) presents five brutish, malevolent, and corrupt specimens of the German military; the squat and thuggish officer in the center, whose holster makes obvious reference to his genitals, crushes a flower under his boot.

And in The Communists Fall and Foreign Exchange Rises (Blood is the Best Sauce)(X1041), another repulsive officer enjoys a genteel meal with a bloated war profiteer, one carving his meat and the other delicately dabbing at a stain on his shirt, while behind them a mob of vicious soldiers wield their bayonets to kill unarmed workers. Grosz based some of these lithographs on drawings he made while a patient in a mental hospital during the war, claiming he wanted to retain “everything that was laughable and grotesque in my environment.” When Grosz exhibited the portfolio at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, he was accused, tried, and found guilty of defaming the military. Like Max Beckmann, Grosz would immigrate to the United States, arriving in New York in 1933.

George Grosz (American, born Germany, 1893-1959). The Communists Fall and Foreign Exchange Rises, 1919. Photo-transfer lithograph, Sheet: 18 9/16 x 24 7/8 in. (47.1 x 63.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection, X1041

Otto Dix noted that “War was something horrible, but nonetheless something powerful…Under no circumstances could I miss it!” But the epic destruction and trauma of modern mechanical warfare and its aftermath was soon made starkly apparent to him.

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969). Card Players (Kartenspieler), 1920. Drypoint on heavy wove paper, Image (Plate): 12 13/16 x 11 1/8 in. (32.5 x 28.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. F.H. Hirschland, 55.165.66. © artist or artist’s estate

After the war, Germany’s streets were filled with one and a half million wounded and crippled soldiers. Dix, who fought as a machine gunner on the Western Front, depicts three such figures in his print Card Players (55.165.66). Here, the war’s capacity for bodily devastation and disintegration is sharply delineated: a mechanical jaw and hand, a patch covering a missing nose, an unseeing glass eye, an ear tube emerging directly from a misshapen skull. Between the three men there is only a single shirt-sleeved and cuff-linked leg; like the other soldier’s mouth it has been repurposed to hold cards. The other prosthetic “legs” and the contraption supporting the torso of the figure on the left are nearly indistinguishable from the chair and table legs. These figures play cards (and smoke cigars!) like they may have done before the war, but in this image of truncated, mechanized men, Dix shows how the war machine remade the world in its own image.

Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945). The Mothers (Die Mütter), 1922–23. Woodcut on heavy Japan paper, 18 13/16 x 25 9/16 in. (47.8 x 64.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 44.201.6. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bon

She explored the physical and spiritual dimensions of the human condition primarily through printmaking, a populist medium that resonated with German artists eager to renew the tradition of Northern Renaissance masters such as Albrecht Dürer. The powerful black and white woodcuts and lithographs on view, drawn from two of her major print portfolios, War (Kreig) (1922–23) and Death (Tod) (1934–35), are intensely personal yet universal expressions of devastation, loss, and grief made in response to the horrors of World War I and the early years of National Socialism.

Kollwitz’s works are part of the Brooklyn Museum’s significant collection of prints by artists associated with the German Expressionist and New Objectivity movements, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, and many others.

Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950). Weeping Woman (Weinende Frau), 1914. Drypoint on heavy wove paper, Image: 9 1/4 x 7 5/16 in. (23.5 x 18.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, By exchange, 38.257. © artist or artist’s estate

The first prints entered the collection in 1937 and were the subject of an exhibition here in 1948, making Brooklyn among the very first major American museums to acquire and present this material (when it was considered contemporary art), a bold move during a period when anti-German sentiment still ran high in the States. The excitement generated by our current presentation of the rarely seen Kollwitz prints seems like a good excuse for a two-part post highlighting some of our other German war-related prints from this era.

Weeping Woman by Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950) (38.257), who suffered a mental breakdown after serving in the medical corps, depicts a woman bringing a handkerchief to her eyes, which appear black and hollow under a mourning veil. Made in the first year of the war, it is thought to be a portrait of the artist’s mother-in-law who, like Kollwitz, lost her son in battle. Beckmann would immigrate to the United States in 1947 and taught for several years at The Brooklyn Museum Art School (which closed in 1985).

Christian Rohlfs (German, 1849-1939). The Prisoner (Der Gefangene), 1918. Color woodcut in blue and overpainted by the artist, on gray wove paper, Image: 25 x 19 1/2 in. (63.5 x 49.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 65.161

In Christian Rohlfs’ (German, 1849-1939) woodcut The Prisoner (65.161), the rough wood grain texture and heavy lines that articulate the subject’s gaunt face, tense hands, and emaciated body, convey the physical immediacy and force of the artist’s hand. The figure seems to be less a specific POW intern than a despairing manifestation of spiritual and emotional imprisonment in a desolate postwar landscape.

Ernst Barlach (German, 1870-1938). Kneeling Woman with Dying Child (Kniende Frau mit sterbenden Kind), 1919. Woodcut on laid paper, Image: 9 x 12 5/8 in. (22.9 x 32.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. F.H. Hirschland, 55.165.76
Image: overall, 55.165.76_bw_IMLS.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

Ernst Barlach (German, 1870-1938) was a close friend of Kollwitz and shared with her a preoccupation with universal themes of human existence and tragedy. In his nightmarish woodcut Kneeling Woman with Dying Child (55.165.76), a withered woman attempts to breastfeed a starving infant, their angular figures merging with the surrounding spiky and barren landscape. Although it calls to mind a medieval emblem of Famine, Barlach’s image is rooted in the reality of the food shortages that occurred in rural Germany after the war.

Hogarth was an English painter and printmaker who took as his subject no less than the panorama of life in 18^th-century London. From the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the teeming and raucous city streets, Hogarth trained his critical eye on themes of marriage, adultery, prostitution, religion, disease, poverty, crime, drunkenness, insanity, gambling, commerce, and, of course, politics, creating indelible images that are spiked with humor and pathos, and brimming with narrative details.

For his four Election series prints (published in 1757-58 and based on his paintings dated 1754-55), Hogarth turned his attention from the squalor of urban life to the corruption of the political world. He was inspired by the notorious contest between the liberal Whig party and the conservative Tory party to win Oxfordshire’s parliamentary seats in the General Election of 1754. Set in the fictional country town of ‘Guzzledown,’ Hogarth depicts four stages of an election, each of which is filled with acts of bribery, mayhem, wastefulness, and venality; in short, a catalogue of behaviors and traits associated with winning by any means and at all costs.

William Hogarth (British, 1697-1764). An Election Entertainment from "Four Prints of an Election," 1755. Engraving on laid paper, 17 1/8 x 21 15/16 in. (43.5 x 55.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Samuel E. Haslett, 22.1875 Image: overall, 22.1875_bw.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph.

The first scene, An Election Entertainment, presents a boisterous banquet organized by the Whig party in an attempt to wine and dine their way to victory. Deliberately parodying the composition of the Last Supper, Hogarth has squeezed his characters around two tables. The two candidates are seated next to each other at the left, one enduring a kiss from a toothless old woman and the other in the rough grip of two drunken men. At the right the local mayor has collapsed and is being bled after consuming too many oysters. Near him is an election agent who has been struck on the head by a brick thrown through the window by the Tory mob protesting outside.

William Hogarth (British, 1697-1764). Canvassing for Votes, from "Four Prints of an Election," 1755. Engraving Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Samuel E. Haslett, 22.1890 Image: overall, 22.1890_bw.jpg. Photo Indianapolis Museum of Art.

In Canvassing for Votes, the second scene, the action takes place outside the Royal Oak inn, the Tory party headquarters. The inn’s sign has been partly covered by another sign that lampoons the Whig candidate, depicting him as the commedia dell’arte character Punch pushing a wheelbarrow full of coins he’s distributing to voters. Ironically, just beneath this sign stands the Tory candidate buying knick-knacks with which to bribe the girls flirting with him from the inn’s balcony, as well as a farmer being solicited simultaneously by political operatives from both parties.

William Hogarth (British, 1697-1764). The Polling from Four Print of an Election, 1758. Engraving on laid paper, 17 3/16 x 21 15/16 in. (43.7 x 55.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Samuel E. Haslett, 22.1892. Photo Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Polling is the third scene of the series and depicts the varied crowd of voters at the polling stand with the two candidates seated on chairs at the back of the platform beneath their party flags. Each side tries to extract votes from whomever they can, while disputing the other side’s right to do the same. The Tories try to get the vote of a seated man with clearly diminished mental faculties, the Whigs carry up a man in a white shroud who is either dying or already dead, and one of the parties’ lawyers appears to challenge a one-legged veteran’s right to swear his oath with the metal hook that has replaced his hand. In the background, a carriage emblazoned with Britannia’s flag topples over while the two coachmen obliviously play cards, further emphasizing the message that political negligence and mismanagement have imperiled the nation.

William Hogarth (British, 1697-1764). Chairing the Members from Four Prints of an Election, 1758. Engraving on laid paper, 17 3/16 x 21 7/8 in. (43.7 x 55.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Samuel E. Haslett, 22.1891. Photo Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The theme of collapse continues in the riotous final scene, Chairing the Members, which shows the successful Tory candidates triumphantly carried through the streets. Led by a blind fiddler and surrounded by a chaotic crowd of people and animals, the central winner is about to fall as one of his bearers has been inadvertently hit in the head by another brawling supporter.

Although many of the allusions in the Election series prints presuppose an insider’s knowledge of the politics, procedures, and characters of the time, Hogarth’s witty and scathing take on the craziness that can surround the democratic process is timeless.

So, with time running out for these face-to-face discussions—the show closes on 5 July!—I urge you to come out here and to let us all know what you see—enter your observations here on this blog or on our digital comment book in the exhibition.

Gustave Caillebotte @ Brooklyn Museum via pixonomy on Flickr.

Here are five reasons to come to see this exhibition:

1. A Brooklyn Exclusive!—Brooklyn is the final stop on this tour and the only American venue for this exhibition. Works by Gustave Caillebotte are rare in American museums—even for collections that are otherwise very rich in Impressionism. We have two at Brooklyn, and this makes us very lucky as I soon discovered when I went looking for more to add to our presentation. Most of the paintings in this exhibition come from private collections, so you will likely not see another significant gathering of works by Caillebotte in New York again very soon.

2. And a Journey to France—As Caillebotte moves from Paris to the French countryside and back to Paris, follow his move from early works executed in the studio to those painted on the spot before the motif. Caillebotte paints a France in flux: the newly reconstructed French capital with its broad avenues and regularized façades—the Paris we know today; coastlines developed with getaway homes for the well-to-do; and suburbs caught between leisure pursuits and a burgeoning heavy industry.

3. Art and Design—An avid competitive yachtsman, Caillebotte revolutionized sailboat design, and we are lucky to have six half-models of his designs in the exhibition. Listen to Tom Jackson, Senior Editor of WoodenBoat, eloquently describe the particularities of Caillebotte’s innovations on our cell phone guide. As scholars have noted, Caillebotte’s engagement with yachting prompted complete conceptions as he designed, built, sailed, and, finally, painted his many boats as they cut through the currents of the Seine or quietly bobbed at his dock. In this way, Caillebotte was like Claude Monet who planted elaborate gardens at Giverny and then painted them.

4. Daring Subject Matters—With The Floor Scrapers—one of two paintings devoted to this subject—Caillebotte established his reputation as a painter to watch when he made his debut at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Many conservative writers disliked such scenes of urban labor, but critics allied with the avant-garde applauded the subject drawn from daily life. And Caillebotte’s Factories at Argenteuil (1888) marries a distinctively modern subject with bold paint handling—listen to Paul Tucker’s cell phone commentary on this one, he says it far better than I can.

5. Painter and Patron—Caillebotte played a critical role in the early days of Impressionism as he financially supported his fellow artists and helped to organize their landmark exhibitions. As one of the most significant early collectors of Impressionism, Caillebotte owned now-iconic works by his fellow painters. When he died prematurely in 1894, his collection of paintings by his Impressionist peers passed to the French state and now forms one of the most important core collections at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. You can catch a glimpse of The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Caillebotte’s Self-Portrait at the Easel (1879). Notably, Caillebotte paints Renoir’s work in a very distinctive manner, but I will let you discover this on your own!

Caillebotte’s Ladies Wear Hats via Trish Mayo on Flickr.

And please do let us know what you observe! Can’t wait to see what you see!

As the head of merchandising at the Brooklyn Museum, it is my responsibility, along with my staff, to keep the Museum shop stocked with a wide range of items that relate to our permanent collections and the special exhibitions that we present here. I recently returned from attending the New York Gift Show, which consumes the entire Javits Center plus 3 Hudson River Piers featuring over 3000 gift product booths. If you walk every aisle, it can be over 8 miles long! Every year, I attend the show with my staff for several long days in search of the latest new products, hottest designs and trends, and most importantly merchandise that represents the upcoming exhibitions. The most recent trade show challenge for us? Caillebotte.

“Who” asked the vendors?? “Gustave Caillebotte”…”Who is he?? Can you spell his name??” So, my immediate reply was to say “you know this artist—he was an Impressionist painter who worked in the late 19th century along with Renoir, Monet, and Sisley.” Usually I still did not get any recognition from my suppliers, so I would continue… “You know his work—his most well known painting is the “Paris Street, Rainy Day” painting from the Art Institute of Chicago—you know the one with the man in the tall top hat with the umbrella”….and VOILA, …I finally would see some recognition. So, having accomplished vendor identification of the artist, now we are on to whether there was any product availability that would suit our needs.

Since most of the paintings in this upcoming exhibition are from a private collection, there is very little existing product with such images available and this means we will have to create custom products. As is the case with this particular example, we often seek out suppliers who can customize product with art images from an exhibition and these custom products might include posters, jewelry, sculptures, t-shirts, mugst, stationery products, etc. etc.

In addition to the custom assortment, we always search for related products that convey more knowledge or tell a story about the artist and the mileu in which he works. In the case of Caillebotte, we had a lot to consider. From reading the catalog and interviewing the curator, Judith Dolkart, we learned not only that he was a highly skilled Impressionist painter, but he also was an avid top notch sailor who innovated and designed racing boats as well as an avid gardener. All three of these facets of his life led us to look for related products and vendors who carried nautical books, gifts, boat models, floral and garden supplies. The aim is to set the ambiance in our Museum Shop by featuring the artist’s color palette, his period in art, his subject matter.

In our search for specially related product, I received a phone call introducing a new potential product referred to me from our Education Department. It turned out that a local Brooklyn vendor, Reiter8, who makes one of a kind tote bags from used canvas sails was going to do a workshop during the Caillebotte exhibition. It was a perfect fit for the Caillebotte’s merchandise assortment—the product was related to the show, made of recycled materials, and from a local Red Hook artisan. I leave you to enjoy this video from this vendor and hope you will visit the Museum Shop during the Caillebotte show.