George Grosz: The Stick Men

This German-English bilingual publication offers the first focused examination of George Grosz's seminal "Stick Men" series (1947–1959), which articulates a sophisticated critique of postwar society and engages with Abstract Expressionism's emergent formal vocabulary. Through meticulous analysis of twenty-four significant paintings and watercolors, accompanied by scholarly essays from distinguished German and American art historians, the catalogue positions these dehumanized figures, wandering through contaminated post-atomic landscapes, as the culmination of Grosz's lifelong artistic and political project.

Drawing upon extensive archival research and new transatlantic scholarship, the publication demonstrates how Grosz's late works synthesize his early Berlin-period critiques of social corruption with his mature response to the Holocaust, nuclear proliferation, and Cold War anxiety, while simultaneously wrestling with modernism's shifting formal imperatives. Thoughtfully reconsidered through this collaboration between Das kleine Grosz Museum and The Heckscher Museum of Art, these prescient works, which combine gestural immediacy with mordant social commentary, emerge as crucial documents for understanding both mid-century artistic production's engagement with historical trauma and painting's continued capacity for meaningful political intervention—concerns that maintain particular resonance within our current moment of resurgent authoritarianism and global instability.

Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung, Germany, 2024

Essays by Pay Matthis Karstens, Juerg Judin, Alice Delage, and Karli Wurzelbacher

Designed by Jakob Straub

Copyedited by SNAP Editions

Fully illustrated, 150 pages

_{© Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York}