Street Scene (Straßenszene)

Unlike many early 20th-century German Expressionist artists who perceived the modern city as a positive repository of irrational, instinctive, and energetic traits and impulses that could free individuals from deadening social constraints, George Grosz conveyed an overtly negative view of the metropolis as a new Babylon. Frequently, his compositions of street and café scenes vented his scorn at the German middle and upper classes, whose material comforts he felt depended on the exploitation of others.

In Street Scene, Grosz’s jumbled composition—employing multiple perspectives and overlaid figures—suggests the fragmentary mode of urban consciousness discussed by cultural critics of the period. Individuality is dissolved into the apparent disorder of daily life and individual will is numbed and replaced by automatic and mechanical actions.

In works such as this one, Grosz perfected a graphic style that simultaneously recalls public graffiti and untutored children’s drawings. Grosz later confirmed his interest in such folkloric and primitive visual sources for their visual immediacy and unadorned veracity. Some of these compositional forms also paralleled contemporaneous scientific advances—the discovery of the x-ray in 1903, for example, and the demonstration of the existence of subatomic particles such as the electron and the nucleus. Both revealed the complexities of a world infused with invisible energies in a constant state of flux.