Amalie

Amalie illustrates one costume group that George Grosz designed for poet Yvan Goll's (1891–1950) play Methusalem, or the Eternal Bourgeois. In the play, Amalie is the plump wife of a wealthy shoe manufacturer. She and the other characters are ridiculed as representatives of middle-class greed. Borrowing a technique used in French Dada performances, Grosz designed two-dimensional cutouts that the actors wore, masking their bodies, gestures, and expressions. In this drawing, Grosz illustrated and commented on the construction of the two-dimensional costume and its peculiarities: the teapot headdress was designed to emit smoke as Amalie spoke, two attached horns could make noise, and wheels allowed for limited movement forward and backward. The inclusion of the red rubber stamp Grosz Constr. 22 appears to refer to Grosz's brief and ambivalent attraction to his contemporaries in Russia, the Constructivists, who were devoted to the idea of machines working with and for humans in an egalitarian socialist society ordered by rationality and geometry.