GEORGE GROSZ: ECCE HOMO [1966] — First Printing + 2 Tipped-in Duplicate Plates IV & XI

Condition: Rare first printing with 2 tipped-in duplicate plates — IV & XI. Dust jacket in very aged condition with significant wear, with multiple rips, scuffs, tears and losses, internal pages have browning and yellowing, duplicate plates have damaged edges and yellowing / browning. 
Signed: No
Inscribed / Personalised: No
Edition: First U.S. Edition
Format: Hardcover with dust jacket
Size: 31 × 23 cm / 12.2 × 9 in
Pages: 112 (includes 100 full-page plates, single-sided)
Publisher: Grove Press
Year: 1966
Illustrations / Photography: 100 plates (84 black & white, 16 color), plus 2 tipped-in duplicate plates (IV and XI)
Text Contributors: Introduction by Henry Miller
Translation: From original German (1923) facsimile edition
Design: Kuhlman Associates
ISBN: N/A

Blurb on dust jacket, written by Henry Miller, 1966:
American critic Edmund Wilson has called George Grosz “the greatest of the satirical artists, at least as great as Hogarth. . . .” Art historian Hans Hess, in his Introduction to the catalogue of the dual retrospective exhibitions presented simultaneously in New York and Berlin in the autumn of 1963, termed Grosz “the most powerful political satirist since Goya and Daumier. If he appears even more bitter than they, the reason is to be found in the nature of his enemies, not in his own nature.”

One might add to these encomiums that Grosz was not only the graphic historian of an entire era beginning with World War I and ending with Hitler’s advent to power, but that he was, too, a prophet of the horrors and chaos that are to would lead to. “There was no excuse later,” notes Hans Hess, “that we did not know what was happening.” In a work such as the incomparable Ecce Homo, or in the other Grosz books and portfolios of the period — The Face of the Ruling Class, God with Us, etc. — all the greed, hate, and hypocrisy of a society without soul, of life devoid of love and compassion, is painted “naked and unadorned.” Grosz was at war with that society, and his work was constantly being attacked as “blasphemous,” “insulting to the army,” and “insulting to public morality” — this last was the one leveled against Ecce Homo when it first appeared in 1923 under the imprint of Der Malik-Verlag. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, Grosz would be hounded out of a Germany in which the democracy for which he was struggling was steadily being extinguished.

“Once you have glimpsed these corrosive portraits,” writes Henry Miller in his Introduction to the present volume, “these street and bedroom scenes, you will never forget them. Do you want a look at dementia, a taste of sadism, a fillip of unadulterated sex, a sample of transmogrification, a reminder of the price of war, just riffle these pages. It’s difficult to imagine there ever were or could be creatures with faces more expressive of lust, despair and abandon than are here depicted. . . . No, one will never forget them once one has seen them through Grosz’ eyes. He used an inkhorn filled, and for his violent colors he blended arsenic, vitriol, cyanide of potassium with an admixture of vomit, shit, sweat and tears. . . .”

“Looking at the drawings in Ecce Homo today, I am filled with the same excitement and unbounded admiration for the artist as I was in 1927 when I first saw his work. All through the years these expressions of despair, hate, and disillusionment, as Grosz himself called them, have remained with me as if burned into my brain. I know of no more compelling reason to have them in our time, or in any other time. They are as naked and ugly, as beautiful and eloquent, as truth itself.”

The present volume is, with the exception of the Henry Miller Introduction, a facsimile edition of the 1923 Malik-Verlag original edition, which has long since become a collector’s item on the rare book market.

Subjects:
George Grosz, German Expressionism, autobiography, political satire, 20th-century art, controversial art, suppressed works, facsimile edition.