American Art Collaborative

In 1920, George Grosz published a lithograph series that mercilessly caricatured German military imperialism. By 1925, the likely year this work was painted, he had begun to apply this relentless critique to German bourgeois society as a whole. In this watercolor, Grosz expresses capitalist greed through the deformation of the human figure; witness the sludgy profiles of the men at the foreground tables. Grosz’s depiction of light from the restaurant window, meanwhile, seems to erode the outlines of the patrons, suggesting a distant, profane utopia in the street’s obliterating lamplight.