Pen and ink drawing
Signed lower right. On fine glassine paper. 34,3 x 24,6 cm (13,5 x 9,6 in), size of sheet
The present work is something rare indeed. It was the model for the photolithograph of the same title, published in 1921 with five other illustrations by George Grosz in the book 'Munkepunke Dionysos – Groteske Liebesgedichte von Alfred Richard Meyer' by Fritz Gurlitt Verlag in Berlin (Dückers B I, 6).

This work is accompanied by a copy of a letter signed by Ralph Jentsch, Rome, and dated 15 May 2006.

PROVENANCE: Collection Siegfried and Gesche Poppe, Hamburg.
Private collection South Germany.

Our print dates from the early 1920s, when the artist took up the theme of the contemporary observant man about town in the big city, Berlin, subjecting the 'pandemonium of human passions' to cynical analysis. Distinguished by class and gender, the social hierarchy of sexual power and the exhibition of the relevant attractions is represented and travestied. The volume of poems by Alfred Richard Meyer illustrated by Grosz is also about love, its aberrations and byways. Our 'Mädchen aus Leipzig' ['A Girl from Leipzig'] cannot hide her profession with decorous bourgeois apparel replete with a hat. Nor do the flower in her hand and the butterflies hovering about her help the least. Oriented as it is towards children’s drawings, graffiti, caricatures from centuries past, porn photos and the Futurist avant-garde, Grosz’s style of drawing represents a repudiation of the bourgeois taste in art. [KR].