Das Bündnis

German artist George Grosz is best known for his political and socially critical works in which he denounced the yawning chasms in society after the First World War and caricatured the legend of the Roaring Twenties by confronting them with the realities of an impoverished, unstable and threatened republic. Grosz’s still lifes, dating from the end of the Twenties, are much less known. Initially ‘very simple and puritanical’, his post-1930 still lifes incorporate a symbolic dimension that has close affinities to Surrealism. In ‘Das Bündnis’ [The Alliance] various mementos combine into an allegorical and puzzling composition: a clay pipe in the form of a cockerel, a pair of ladies’ gloves on a pink fabric which, at the lower end at the right dissolves into a shell-like form and behind it the likeness of a man and woman in close enough proximity to suggest intimacy. The assembled objects seem to float in an unworldly atmosphere. This still life was made shortly before Grosz made his first trip to America. In January 1933 the artist emigrated to the USA and took up permanent residence there. Many of the works he left behind fell into the hands of the National Socialists and were denounced as ‘degenerate art’.