Rome is celebrating German artist George Grosz, with an exhibition charting his entire career, from his little-known theatrical work to the savage caricatures of 1920s Berlin that made him famous.
The show in Villa Medici is Italy's first real retrospective of Grosz's art, with 200 sketches, watercolours, oils and illustrations, on loan from public and private collections around the world.
Starting with his earliest drawings in 1910, when Grosz was just 16, the exhibit interweaves his art with details from his life, including letters, photos and private documents.
Although much of his early work is realistic, it already displays his fascination with the grotesque that later gained him such renown.
Born in Berlin in 1893, Grosz's experiences fighting in World War I played a crucial role in forging his political beliefs. He joined the German Communist Party in 1921, but quit after spending time with Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, where he grew disillusioned with authoritarianism.
Back in Germany, he set his sights on Berlin society in the 1920s.
His work from the period has had a strong influence on later art, as well as modern conceptions of that era, drawing out its decadence and hypocrisy through dozens of pencil and watercolour drawings.
His vision of the German capital during the Weimar Republic was summed up by a 1932 article in Time magazine, written shortly after the artist emigrated to the US: "Bourgeois Germany has crumpled before Grosz's terrible pencil, his contemptuous and exact eye. Frequent victims are bull-necked burghers, drunken women with raddled skin and pendulous breasts, fops with snub noses and muskrat mouths, gaunt marble-jawed soldiers, starving children, slattern-mouthed old shrews.
"All are made contemptible, rarely laughable. The pictures look like a child's scrawls, full of scratchy, distracting detail. But critics perceive the basis of sound craftsmanship, understand Grosz's potent European influence".
Grosz's wide range of targets - including the military, the church and the bourgeois - eventually got him into trouble with German authorities and, combined with his loathing of the Nazis, led him to leave the country in 1932.
He settled in New York, where he started teaching at the Art Students League, and gained American citizenship six years later.
The softer style he developed in the 1930s and 1940s proved less popular but was well suited to his theatrical work. The exhibition includes the first public display of a variety of the stage and costume designs he produced for works by George Bernard Shaw, Iwan Holl and Georg Kaiser.
Although the less abrasive style of his later years was generally not received so well, it showcases his skill as a draftsman, which is often overlooked in his caricatures.
The exhibition charts Grosz's career until the year of his death, 1959, with the final work a pop art collage.
'Georg Grosz: Berlin-New York' runs from May 9 until July 15 in the Villa Medici.
