1960.136 George Grosz, The Crucified Ham

The brutal pessimism of George Grosz's  wartime work reached its crescendo in the series of "stick-men" paintings Grosz made in the postwar years. In these haunting scenes, wraithlike figures engage in brutal acts of terror, or stand, still and horrified, in an apocalyptic landscape. Grosz described the stick men as "mutilated and wilted dreams or shall I say memorials of long ago." [1]

The stick-men images have often been described as Grosz's response to the end of World War II and the immediate postwar period. In the final months of the war, Grosz had lost his mother and aunt in the Allied bombing of Berlin, adding personal loss to the larger horrors of the end of the war, including the full revelation of the atrocities of the concentration camps and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, Grosz's family and friends reported on the conditions of brutal penury and starvation in Berlin, which Grosz and his wife attempted to relieve with regular shipments of food. The grotesque stick men, attacking their victims with forks and can openers, and the images' conflation of flesh and meat, seem to collapse all the horrors of the war into an unending, nightmarish landscape.

[1] George Grosz, "On the Stickmen," no. 1052, George Grosz Archive.

Heather MacDonald, Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2012), 28-29.

The stickmen come in many forms. Frequently they are in a group of four, consisting of two adults and two children. In such images, Grosz portrays himself, his wife, and their two sons. They are seen crossing wasted landscapes, sometimes discovering a flower or accusing a fat man. However, the stickmen can also be aggrestive, either individually or in a group. In this painting the hungry stickmen are falling upon a grilled ham hanging from a stick. With martial gestures, two of them use a rough saw to cut thick slices of meat. The third stickman in the group piles the pieces onto a large wooden spoon. A macabre scene features a pig suspended by its legs, tied aroudn the middle, with a ragged cloth that closely resembles a loincloth. Unquestionably , Grosz associaties the crucified pig with the crucifixion of Christ, referring to a provocation that became a pbulic scnadal: in a 1927 drawing, Maul halten und weiter dienen (Shut Your Mouth and Keep Serving), about the Good Soldier Svejk, Grosz portrayed Christ on the cross wearing a gas mask and military boots." 

Watercolor 

Until 1960: A. Harris and Company

From 1960: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, gift of A. Harris and Company in memory of Leon A. Harris, Sr. [1]

[1] The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.

UMO: 13310104   Reflections on George Grosz, Gallery talk with Marty Grosz, George Grosz's son

UMO: 13316211   Politics as Art: Grosz's Influence on Political Cartooning

Apply to objects where number equals 1960.136