Museum for George Grosz in Berlin: domicile in the gas station
Berlin It’s a real gem. “The Little Grosz Museum” Fresh from its opening, it presents itself as an art oasis in Berlin-Schoeneberg that is not only frequented by connoisseurs. Its location is a generously renovated Shell petrol station from the 1950s, which has been supplemented with an exhibition room. The gallery owner Jürg Judin, who moved into the gas station in 2009, is enthusiastic about George Grosz’s work.
Judin managed the recent conversion into a Grosz museum with a café and rented it out to the “George Grosz in Berlin” association, which was founded in 2015.
The association, which includes lawyers, the construction company Kompass-Wohnen and the Max Beckmann heiress Mayen Beckmann, runs the museum. It is intended to create “a short-term crystallization point” for the artist, who is underrepresented in his native city, and to introduce thematic exhibitions to his overall work.
The chairman of the association is the former art dealer, administrator of the private Grosz estate and Expressionism researcher Ralph Jentsch. Jentsch, curator of numerous exhibitions and publications, has exposed hundreds of forgeries over the years, including the Beltracchi forgeries bearing false Galerie Flechtheim stickers.
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He never tires of fighting for the restitution of Grosz works from museums in Bremen, Cologne, Vienna, Paris, New York and Tokyo on behalf of the estate.
For six years, the estate had fought to release 300 works that New York art dealer Serge Sabarsky had stored as unaccounted for inventory. In 2003 the case was won. Works from this pool were then shown for the first time in an exhibition at the Berlin gallery Brockstedt.
The opening show is dedicated to George Grosz’s early years. A highly talented draftsman, who initially saw himself as a caricaturist, showed up while he was still at the academy. But soon, with a delay since 1912, the artist appeared in the central themes of his more recent work: lust murder, suicide, robbery, brothel scenes, urban chaos.
With relentless drawings of World War II corpses, he became a political chronicler, which he remained until the end of his life. In the pen and ink drawing “German Men”, dated 1917, a suicide man dangles from a rope over a paunchy passer-by and a fat supper man.
Grosz is a factor in the art market
In the lower area of the exhibition, key works from all periods hang as an introduction, mostly from private collections in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Watercolors from the 1920s hang here, the famous drawing of the greasy industrialist with a cigar, strong sheets from the American period, including a watercolor from 1934 that shows Hitler in an ape-man pose over a fire.
The museum is a worthy tribute. But it cannot be said that there is a lack of appreciation for Grosz’s life’s work in Berlin. The kidney village gallery always had a large collection of watercolors and drawings ready. The great retrospective in the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1995 is fondly remembered, and it left nothing to be desired. In 2008, the erotic watercolors were shown in the so-called “Expressionale” at Potsdamer Platz.
“Please write Grosz instead of Gross”
In 2009, the Nolan Judin gallery ran a show of works from the estate from the American years, and in 2010 the Berlin Academy of Arts showed the lesser-known collages by the artist, created between 1917 and 1958. In 2019, the Deutsches Historisches Museum acquired the apocalyptic painting “Cain or Hitler in Hell”, which was listed ten years earlier in the Nolan Judin show for 4 million euros.
There is no question that Grosz is a market factor. Again and again it is the watercolors that fetch top prices. In 2013, a Grosz exhibition at Richard Nagy’s London gallery featured sheets that were offered for over £500,000. Again and again works come under the hammer in auctions, the prices of which go through the roof.
One of the most expensive was the 1915 watercolor “Caféhaus”, which rose to £904,000 at Christie’s in 2006, while the “Soirée”, dated seven years later, was sold at Lempertz in 2016 for €446,400.
The hunger for colored works from the 1920s and early 1930s is still great. But among the ink drawings, of which there are always large numbers that flow into the auctions, there are still quite a few in the price range of up to 20,000 euros.
The exhibition “Please write Grosz instead of Gross. How Georg Ehrenfried Groß became the political George Grosz” runs until October 17, 2022 in Das Kleine Grosz-Museum, Bülowstraße 18, 10783 Berlin. Admission only with a pre-booked ticket www.daskleinegroszmuseum.berlin. The catalog costs 30 euros.
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