George Grosz

George Grosz.

Yanase, Masamu (柳瀬 正夢).

Musan kaikyû no gaka Georuge Gurossu (無産階級の畫家ゲオルゲ・グロッス).

Tokio, Tetto Shoin 1929.

Colour frontispiece, 42pp. and 58 plates, one in colour.

Original boards with original illustrated cardboard slipcase.

EUR 650

Rare monograph on the German artist George Grosz by Japanese artist Masamu Yanase (1900-1945), who was influenced by the futurist movement and was a founder of the MAVO.

The book is a testament to the transcultural exchange between the European and Japanese avant-garde in the 1920s. While George Grosz called himself “George” in English in Germany, he was known in Japan by the German pronunciation “Georg Grosz” (ゲオルゲ・グロッス). He was regarded as an absolute cult figure in the left-leaning art and manga scene there in the 1920s. On the one hand, Yanase celebrated Grosz as a “courageous fighter” who ruthlessly exposed the “ulcers of capitalism.” At the same time, however, he leveled sharp criticism from a proletarian-revolutionary perspective: He criticized the lingering petty-bourgeois, nihilistic tendencies in Grosz’s work. For Yanase, Grosz’s pure, often cynical negation was not enough; instead, he called for art that actively contributes to constructive class struggle and socialist construction. The book impressively demonstrates how strongly the aesthetics of New Objectivity and Dadaism shaped political graphics and the early development of caricature and manga in prewar Japan.

Very fine copy.