George Grosz: Stickmen: Solo Exhibition

In 1946, George Grosz moved to Huntington, Long Island, where he would conceive of the “Stickmen”, articulating one of his most harrowing and profound series in the few years that followed. Anatomically, the creatures descended from the insect protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, explaining their spindly bodies and segmented appendages. In the years after the war, Grosz also received letters which described horrific starvation in Germany, where the emaciated walked the streets, driven mad by hunger. The artist’s colorless collective can often be found in pursuit of a fat enemy or trampling on any symbols of color, freedom and individuality, such as the rainbow flag. The plump caricatures who embodied wealth and greed incite the hostile Stickmen, thus leading to their grisly demise. The body of work is imbued with the same pessimism of Giacometti’s sculptures and literary existentialism of the post-war, post-nuclear era.

Grosz's political caricatures circulated in the United States, making an impact on the New York art scene even prior to his relocation.  The artist was photographed in New York in 1948 by Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine’s feature on the center of the art world. Kubrick, who at the time was in the same photographic milieu as Diane Arbus and Weegee, would preoccupy himself with the same grotesque and abject essence of Grosz. These early films in the spirit of noir and war genres were riddled with morally corrupt characters and gross acts of violence and greed. While Grosz was in New York, he would teach at the Art Students League, where one of his most notable pupils was James Rosenquist, whose billboard sized paintings of advertisements, pop culture paraphernalia and everyday objects criticized the hyper-consumerism embedded in American capitalism. Grosz’s Stickmen, while products of a specific zeitgeist, represent a universal struggle for autonomy, individualism and liberation that remains relevant in today’s world.