Watercolor and pencil
Signed lower center, lower left with later dedication "M. lb. Fritz Mosert zu seinem 50. Wiegenfeste! Ehmsen Berlin 1932". Inscribed "Degeneriert Nr. 1 1923/24" on verso. On light cardboard. 30 x 39,7 cm (11,8 x 15,6 in), the full sheet

PROVENANCE: Fritz Mosert, Berlin.
Collection Marvin and Janet Fishman.

EXHIBITION: From Expressionism to Resistance: Art in Germany 1909-1936. The Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee/Berlinische Galerie, Berlin/Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a.M./Kunsthalle, Emden/The Jewish Museum, New York/Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska/High Museum of Art, Atlanta 1990-92.
The Janet and Marvin Fishman Collection: New Acquisitions, Recent Gifts and Old Friends, University Art Museum, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1994.
Art as Resistance. The Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Museum Escher in Het Paleis, The Hague/Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm/Helsingin Taidehalli, Helsinki/Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels 1995/96.
Hard Times: Germany 1920s-1930s. Crossman Gallery, Wisconsin-Whitewater/Northwestern Mutual Art Gallery, Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee 2006.

The drastic contrasts in an uprooted society are the preferred themes of the avant-garde artists of the 1920s. Ehmsen, who also worked up the same topic in form of etchings, takes on the means of an illustration with grotesque traits in order to depict social misery, thus adding more bitingness to the subject. The influence of works by George Grosz is clearly visible, however, thy differ in artistic expression. While Grosz picks out the state of a society’s moral decay as a central theme, Ehmsen visualizes the individual’s deformations as a consequence of the social distortions of those days. [KD].