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.