George Grosz

From the end of the 1930s, George Grosz increasingly worked on his erotic works in the USA, some of which bordered on the pornographic and were simply outrageous from the point of view of the time, so naturally met with widespread rejection in American society and were omitted for a long time in tacit censorship. For the eyes of the average American, trained in Puritanism, it is an unacceptably provocative depiction: naked and in baroque carnality, with legs spread apart, the model lies on a branch.... Grosz paints both the model and the background, from which the bodies emerge somewhat brighter, almost exclusively in sensual shades of pink, yellow and green. The artist models the curves of the female body with a sensitively curved style. It is the pure pleasure of existence that Grosz paints here. The biting satire of the Berlin period is at best still perceptible in the model in a hint of vulgarity.