Date: Jan 21, 2010

Hofstra University Museum Painting Used In Major Publication

George Grosz: The Years in America, 1933-1958

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY – A Hofstra University Museum painting by German artist George Grosz, A Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets, is being featured in a unique new book, George Grosz: The Years in America, 1933-1958, examining the time Grosz spent working in America and the effect this had on his work.

A Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets was donated to the Hofstra University Museum in 1993, from the estate of Arnott J. White. It has been in traveling exhibitions at the LA County Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany. During this past year the painting was included in an exhibition titled, “Kassandra: Images of Catastrophe” at the German Historic Museum, Berlin.

Grosz was well known for his savagely caricature drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s, and immigrated to the United States in 1933. A Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets (oil on paper on masonite) was painted by Grosz in 1942. This powerful work shows the Fuhrer marching through the snow to Moscow hand in greatcoat in Napoleonic style. The Fuhrer is confronted by two diminutive poets, clutching lyre and swastika-emblazoned, worthless banknotes, their naked buttocks protruding from their ragged garments.

“This is one of Grosz’s major pictorial indictments of the Nazi era,” stated Executive Director of the Hofstra University Museum Beth Levinthal.

George Grosz: The Years in America, 1933-1958, was edited by Juerg M. Judin, with essays by Ralph Jentsch, Juerg M. Judin and Barbara McCloskey, and published by Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2009.

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