Die guten Jahre

Ralph Jentsch has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

‘Don’t expect my drawings to illustrate any run-of-the mill lovers’ idyll. Realist that I am, I use my pen and brush primarily for taking down what I see and observe, and that is generally unromantic, sober and not very dreamy.’ – George Grosz
(Grosz, Love above all, and other drawings: 120 works by George Grosz, New York, 1971, preface)

During the early 1920s George Grosz began to step away from the more provocative, politically charged subjects that had dominated his work in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and instead trained his eye on the lives of ordinary people, capturing the banality, hypocrisies and darkness that often lay behind the facade of polite society. In Die guten Jahre the artist takes aim at the amorous liaisons of a middle-aged couple, seen in their elegantly appointed bourgeois boudoir. The woman is intent on seduction, wearing a negligee and stockings, her face heavily made up, while her partner seems less than joyful at the prospect, fully clothed and scowling. Capturing the dynamic between the two characters, Grosz slyly emphasises that ‘The Good Years’ suggested by the title have passed the couple by.

The artist saw his work from this period not as a purely satirical view on society, but rather as important factual illustrations which revealed the unvarnished truth of life: ‘All these things, the people and phenomena, I drew meticulously,’ Grosz explained. ‘I loved none of it, neither what I saw in the restaurants nor what was in the streets. I had the presumption to see myself as a scientist, not a painter or indeed a satirist’ (Grosz, quoted in I. Kranzfelder, George Grosz: 1893-1959, Cologne, 2001, p. 49). Having said this, Die guten Jahre is a highly painterly work, showcasing Grosz’s supreme command of the watercolour medium. Working wet-on-wet, so that the fluid colour washes would bleed into each other and create varying intensities from light wash to a richness of dark shades, Grosz achieves a nuanced mix of vibrant saturated tones and delicate, almost transparent, passages of colour. Outlines and details were then added to the composition using a fine-nibbed, flexible pen and ink, the resulting lines flowing with an ease and delicacy that stood in marked contrast to the ‘knife-hard’ graffiti-based style of his earlier drawings.