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Slide  The Cafe  Grosz  BNA

Café where you see those who have grown rich on the war dining sybaritically. Grosz made many prints & drawings on this theme of waste & greed & he achieved an early fame for them.

There was, naturally, no place for George Grosz in Nazi Germany & he has lived comfortably & successfully in this country a number of years now. He at first carried on this reputation for social satire by caricaturing our new rich but there was never the same conviction to the work & he left it for the more pictorial, or if some humanitarian theme, to something profounder & more universal. He has rather repudiated some of the excesses of this early work but you can easily recall the fantastic conditions of postwar Germany & understand the bitterness & the specificness of their attack.

I have deliberately said nothing of the contemporary American printmakers. The field, while recent, is large & unsifted, especially in the socially conscious & humanitarian phases. Perhaps nearly half the graphic work done today has some social aspect. But the higher integration of art & humanity that has been our concern is still rare.