Across the Lake

1939

By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1932, George Grosz had spent a decade painting shocking figure subjects that indicted the dissipated society and corrupt regime of Weimar Germany and led to his condemnation by Hitler’s Nazi government. Once in this country, Grosz freed himself to paint landscapes and took up watercolor. In that medium he began to experience the pure pleasure of painting with a liberated, almost calligraphic touch bearing no relation to the lurid tones and laboriously worked surfaces of his German oil paintings.