The Heckscher Transforms Art History With George Grosz ‘Stickmen’ Exhibition

The burly naked father and child figures, ruddy cheeks and rosy flesh, look pleased as they face each other and walk to the left, followed by a Stickman father figure and three smaller Stickmen. Sweat drips from Father Pig's face as he drags on a chicken bone like a cigarette, his belly filled with a mug of beer and cuts of fatty meat and meatballs, offering a comical x-ray vision of the their predatory lifestyle. The tallest of the smaller Stickmen raises an arm, hinting at a Sieg Heil salute.

Laughing in disgust at the hulking patriarch, we can't help but think of a current US presidential candidate, underscoring the timeliness of this 78-year-old watercolor on paper. The nuances and complexity are built with precise brushwork, casting shadows to magnify the portly figures, while the Stickmen exist in one dimension. Close examination reveals line drawings buried in the background.

Stickmen Meeting of members of the bourgeoisie (1946) is among the visceral visual narrative of the Stickmen series that George Grosz created when the German artist moved to Huntington, Long Island, that year. Perhaps Grosz, a creative force among the Dada art movement in 1920s Berlin, was borrowing from the “ungeheures Ungeziefer” (roughly translated as monstrous cattle) in the work of Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosiswritten in 1912 and published in 1915. This reference seems more plausible in watercolor on real paper, The bug men are coming (circa 1945).

Exposing the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and the U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Grosz does not spare the tender, tearful viewer as he depicts raw, no-holds-barred reality. In sight at The Heckscher Art Museum in Huntington, New York, through September 1, George Grosz: The Stick Men shows 33 watercolors, oils and drawings, in the first exhibition dedicated to the series since it debuted in 1948 at the Associated American Artists galleries in New York City. This unique adaptation of the exhibition of the same name organized by Museum Das kleine Grosz in Berlin, dedicated to the artist's career, presents works by The Heckscher and European public and private collections.

Like the series itself, the expanded exhibition at The Heckscher ties closely to the local community, including Grosz's masterpiece Eclipse of the Sun (1926), along with loans from institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College and Harvard Art Museums.

A doctoral dissertation could be devoted to unpacking the various elements and influences of Eclipse of the Sunand hours exploring countless contemporary Stickmen references.

“This painting (solar eclipse) it is part of The Heckscher collection and is really key to our identity. We acquired it in 1968, when the museum had no acquisition funds. To buy it, our director at the time was Eva Gatling (one of the first women to run an art museum in the US), and she actually did a crowdfunding campaign, an email and said “send- us the money you can”. And the kids at Huntington High School (where Grosz's son went to high school) pooled the lunch money and about 200 kids wrote a check for $80 to help us buy this play.” explained the chief curator of The Heckscher. Karli Wurzelbacher – who was co-curator The stick men together with Pay Matthis Karstens and Alice Delage from Das kleine Grosz, he said during a visit last Saturday.

My 14-year-old son Michael carefully observed how the hand of the headless, and therefore mindless, figure in the lower left of the Eclipse of the Sun canvas, fades and becomes transparent. Throughout Grosz's depictions, there are leaders and followers of dictators, and the former often become ghostly, falling to the periphery of apocalyptic worlds.

From the first look at the Stickmen series, it was clear that the British illustrator Ralph Steadman, best known for his collaboration with American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, was deeply inspired by Grosz's work. When we enter the second room of the comprehensive and thoughtful exhibition, our gaze meets I was always present (1942). Skulls and horsemen recur in Steadman's works, and a most notable homage I was always present seems abundant in his Your favorite High Street bank.

When we got home to the Lower East Side on Saturday evening, my husband, playwright, author and fellow aesthete Mike immediately thrown Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink, the definitive retrospective monograph of the artist's career published by Chronicle Chroma in November 2020, from one of our art shelves. He pored over the pages, confirming to the press that Steadman credits Grosz among his mentors. Mike was also quick to notice how Grosz also evoked Tim Burton's unique gothic style, the weirdness and whimsy of the wedding.

Throughout the show, there is a wide variety of art historical references, spanning widely across centuries and decades. We spy how Grosz is artistically aligned with the German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer Max Beckmann in early society portraits such as Untitled (male and female) (circa 1920). We can't deny the compositional similarities between the deliciously raw and haunting images of Meat channel and raptor (980) of the British figurative painter of Irish origin Francis Bacon and that of Grosz The Crucified Ham (1950), three decades earlier. With both the Stickmen poses, and again, the figures on horseback, we can draw a comparison with the Canadian street and studio artist Richard Hambleton, who was seven years old when Grosz died. Michael had fun with works like Uprooted (The Painter of the Hole) (1948) serving as a nod to the punctured canvases of the Argentinian-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist Lucio Fontana. For Grosz, the artist figures The hole painter he is brainless and his artworks are empty “holes”, exemplifying Dadaist anti-art sentiment.

A labyrinthine journey through art historical reference and inference awaits, about two hours from Midtown Manhattan via the Long Island Rail Road and a Suffolk County Transit bus, or about 90 minutes by car. This exhibition, along with The Heckscher's far-reaching permanent collection, including must-see works by Howardena Pindell. Relationships (Kandinsky #1)by Alice Rahon The Conjuration of Antelopesand Alison Saar's reapers.

Even though you work like this The enemy of the rainbow (1946) were painted more than three decades before Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow pride flag for San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day in 1978 as a symbol of hope and liberation, not we can avoid thinking again about how Grosz would interpret contemporary culture with this. recurring symbol. Grosz likely borrowed the rainbow flag designed in Essen, Germany in 1922 to symbolize unity in diversity, for the first International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) Cooperative Day in July 1923. The anonymous collective of Stickmen certainly held up badly. , a banal and monochromatic nightmare that was opposed to such extravagant color and revelry.

Small but powerful, isolated but worldly, this is the small museum that succeeds, with contextualisation, diversity and free entry among its main attractions. It was founded in 1920 by German-born American capitalist and philanthropist August Heckscher and his wife Anna, who gave the Heckscher the purpose-built museum and 185 works of art (focusing on Old Masters and Northern painters 19th and 20th century Americans) Trust, a non-profit foundation they created to benefit the citizens of Huntington.

The Heckscher Trust transferred ownership of the museum to Huntington in 1954, and city officials encouraged citizens to serve on the Trust's Art Committee. The New York State Board of Regents issued the museum's Charter Absolute in 1957, and the city officially delegated operational responsibility for the museum to the independent Board of Trustees of the newly created non-profit organization. Today, Wurzelbacher has the ability to insightfully guide the curation of the rotating permanent collection and world-class exhibitions like this consummate celebration of Grosz.