The Heckscher Transforms Art History With George Grosz ‘Stickmen’ Exhibition

Corpulent naked child and father figures, their cheeks ruddy and their flesh porcine-pink, appear smug as they face and walk to the left, followed by a Stickman father figure and three smaller Stickmen. Beads of sweat trickle from the piggish father’s face as he drags on a chicken bone as if it’s a cigarette, his paunch is filled with a mug of beer and cuts of fatty meat and meatballs, offering comical X-ray insight into his rapacious lifestyle. The tallest of the smaller Stickmen raises an arm, hinting at a Sieg Heil salute.

Chortling in abhorrence at the ponderous patriarch, we can’t help but think of a current leading U.S. presidential candidate, underscoring the timeliness of this 78-year-old watercolor on paper. Nuance and complexity are built with precise brushwork, casting shadows to magnify the portly figures, while the Stickmen exist on a single dimension. Close examination reveals line drawings buried in the background.

Stickmen Meeting Members of the Bourgeoisie (1946) is among the visceral visual narrative Stickmen series George Grosz created when the German artist moved to Huntington, Long Island, that year. Perhaps Grosz, a creative force among the Dada art movement in 1920s Berlin, was borrowing from the “ungeheures Ungeziefer” (roughly translated as monstrous vermin) in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and published in 1915. That reference seems more plausible in the watercolor on laid paper, The Insectmen are Coming (circa 1945).

Exposing the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and the U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Grosz spares no teary, tender viewer as he depicts harsh reality without restraint. On view at the The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, through September 1, George Grosz: The Stick Men showcases 33 watercolors, oils, and drawings, in the first exhibition dedicated to the series since it debuted in 1948 at the Associated American Artists galleries in New York City. This unique adaptation of the exhibit by the same name organized by Das kleine Grosz Museum in Berlin, which is dedicated to the artist’s career, features works from The Heckscher and European public and private collections.

Like the series itself, the expanded exhibition at The Heckscher ties itself closely to the local community, by including Grosz’s masterpiece Eclipse of the Sun (1926), along with loans from institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and Harvard Art Museums.

One could dedicate a doctoral thesis to unpacking the various elements and influences of Eclipse of the Sun, and hours mining myriad contemporary references from the Stickmen.

“This painting (Eclipse of the Sun) is part of The Heckscher’s collection, and is really key to our identity. We acquired it in 1968, a time when the museum had no acquisition funds. In order to purchase it, our director at the time was Eva Gatling (one of the first women to direct a U.S. art museum), and she really did a crowdfunding campaign, a mailing, and said ‘send us any money you can’. And school children at Huntington High School (where Grosz’s son went to high school) pooled their lunch money and about 200 kids wrote a check for $80 to help us purchase this work,” explained The Heckscher’s Chief Curator Karli Wurzelbacher – who co-curated The Stick Men along with Pay Matthis Karstens and Alice Delage of Das kleine Grosz – said during a walkthrough last Saturday.

My 14-year-old son Michael keenly observed how the hand of the headless, and thereby mindless, figure on the lower left of the Eclipse of the Sun canvas, fades away and becomes transparent. Throughout Grosz’s depictions, there are leaders and followers of dictators, and the former often become ghostlike, falling into the periphery of apocalyptic worlds.

From first glance at the array of Stickmen, it became widely apparent that British illustrator Ralph Steadman, best known for his collaboration with American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, was deeply inspired by Grosz’s oeuvre. As we walk into the second room of the comprehensive and thoughtful exhibition, our gaze meets I Was Always Present (1942). Skulls and horsemen recur in Steadman’s works, and a most notable homage to I Was Always Present seems abundant in his Your Favourite High Street Bank.

When we arrived home to the Lower East Side Saturday evening, my playwright-author-fellow aesthete husband Mike immediately pulled Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink, the artist’s definitive career retrospective monograph published by Chronicle Chroma in November 2020, from one of our art-bookshelves. Her pored through the pages, confirming in print that Steadman credits Grosz among his mentors. Mike also quickly noticed how Tim Burton’s singular gothic style, wedding eerie and whimsey, was also awakened by Grosz.

Throughout the display, there is an array of art historical references, sweeping broadly across the centuries and decades. We spy how Grosz is artistically aligned with German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer Max Beckmann in early society portraits such as Untitled (Man and Woman) (circa 1920s). We cannot deny the compositional similarities between the deliciously raw and disturbing imagery of Carcase Of Meat And Bird Of Prey (980) by Irish-born British figurative painter Francis Bacon, and Grosz’s The Crucified Ham (1950), three decades earlier. Both with the stances of Stickmen, and again, the figures of horseback, we can draw a comparison to Canadian street and studio artist Richard Hambleton, who was seven years old when Grosz died. Michael was amused by works like Uprooted (The Painter of the Hole) (1948) serving as a nod to Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist Lucio Fontana’s punctured canvases. For Grosz, the artist figure in The Painter of Hole is brainless and his artworks are vacant “holes,” exemplifying Dadaist anti-art sentiment.

A labyrinthine journey through art historical reference and inferences awaits, some two hours from Midtown Manhattan via the Long Island Rail Road and a Suffolk County Transit bus, or about 90 minutes in a car. This exhibition, along with The Heckscher’s far-reaching permanent collection which includes must-see works such as Howardena Pindell’s Relationships (Kandinsky #1), Alice Rahon’s La Conjuration des Antilopes, and ​​Alison Saar’s Reapers.

Though works such as The Enemy of the Rainbow (1946) were painted more than three decades before Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow pride flag for the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day as a symbol of hope and liberation, we can’t help but again think of how Grosz would interpret contemporary culture with this recurring symbol. Grosz is likely borrowing the rainbow flag designed in Essen, Germany in 1922, to symbolize unity in diversity, for the International Co-operative Alliance’s (ICA’s) first Co-operators’ Day in July 1923. Certainly, the anonymous collective of Stickmen endured morose, banal, monochromatic drudgery that opposed such flamboyant color and revelry.

Small but mighty, secluded but worldly, this is the little museum that triumphs, with contextualization, diversity, and free admission among its key draws. It was founded in 1920 by German-born American capitalist and philanthropist August Heckscher, and his wife Anna, who donated the purpose-built museum and 185 works of art (focused on Old Masters and leading 19th and 20th century American painters) to the Heckscher Trust, a non-profit foundation they created to benefit the citizens of Huntington.

The Heckscher Trust transferred ownership of the museum to the Huntington in 1954, and town officials encouraged citizens to serve on the Trust’s Art Committee. The New York State Board of Regents issued museum’s Absolute Charter in 1957, and the town officially delegated operational responsibility of the museum to the independent Board of Trustees of the newly formed non-profit organization. Today, Wurzelbacher is empowered to perspicaciously guide curation of the rotating permanent collection and such world-class exhibitions as this consummate celebration of Grosz.