The Funeral (often The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza)) is a painting by the German Expressionist artist George Grosz, completed between 1917 and 1918. The work combines elements of Futurism and Cubism[1] to show a funeral procession in a modern urban city, as an infernal abyss populated by twisted and grotesque attendants.[2] The painting is dedicated to the German psychiatrist and avant-garde writer Oskar Panizza (1853-1921), noted for his play Liebeskonzil which draws on the first historically documented outbreak of syphilis and depicts God the Father as a senile old man. Panizza's works, in which he rejected militarism and religious authority were deemed blasphemous by the Church and the government of Emperor Wilhelm II. They were later admired by Grosz and other idealists of the dada generation.[1]
The painting seeks to emulate medieval depictions of hellscapes, mainly through dramatic colourisation—in particular through its use of red light—as well as through the depiction of multitudes of layered distorted bodies and limbs, echoing the work of Bruegel in the 16th century. A skeleton representing the Grim Reaper sits on the coffin, drinking[3] from a bottle. A mob of mourners gathered around him are presented as ugly, frenzied and as if ridden with alcoholism and late-stage syphilis.[4]
Tall claustrophobic buildings are lined above the procession. They seem to heave and bend backwards and forwards, as if about to topple over and collapse onto those cluddered below.[2] Among these buildings is a lone small church, surrounded by bars, nightclubs and offices. Giving a literal voice to the "Dance of Death" depicted by the artist, a sign over one club reads "DANCE TONIGHT".[1]
Explaining his intention when creating the work, Grosz said,
"In a strange street by night, a hellish procession of dehumanized figures mills, their faces reflecting alcohol, syphilis, plague ... I painted this protest against a humanity that had gone insane."[1]
The painting served as the cover artwork for the 1987 album I Am a Wallet by the British rock band McCarthy.
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park is a privately owned cemetery in Glendale, California, United States. It is the original and current flagship location of Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks & Mortuaries, a chain of six cemeteries and four additional mortuaries in Southern California.
George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at the Art Students League of New York. In 1959 he returned to Berlin, where he died shortly afterwards.
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is a Protestant church affiliated with the Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia, a regional body of the Protestant Church in Germany. It is located in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm in the centre of the Breitscheidplatz.
The New Objectivity was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against expressionism. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, who used it as the title of an art exhibition staged in 1925 to showcase artists who were working in a post-expressionist spirit. As these artists—who included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter and Jeanne Mammen—rejected the self-involvement and romantic longings of the expressionists, Weimar intellectuals in general made a call to arms for public collaboration, engagement, and rejection of romantic idealism.
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
The Neue Galerie New York is a museum of early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design located in the William Starr Miller House at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Established in 2001, it is one of the most recent additions to New York City's famed Museum Mile, which runs from 83rd to 105th streets on Fifth Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Johann Wilhelm II, Elector Palatine of the Wittelsbach dynasty was Elector Palatine (1690–1716), Duke of Neuburg (1690–1716), Duke of Jülich and Berg (1679–1716), and Duke of Upper Palatinate and Cham (1707–1714). From 1697 onwards Johann Wilhelm was also Count of Megen.
Christian Schad was a German painter and photographer. He was associated with the Dada and the New Objectivity movements. Considered as a group, Schad's portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I.
Metaphysical painting or metaphysical art was a style of painting developed by the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began in 1910 with de Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality, "painting that which cannot be seen". De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917.
I Am a Wallet is the debut studio album by English indie pop band McCarthy. It was first released in November 1987.
German art has a long and distinguished tradition in the visual arts, from the earliest known work of figurative art to its current output of contemporary art.
Leopold Hermann Oskar Panizza was a German psychiatrist and avant-garde author, playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, publisher and literary journal editor. He is best known for his provocative tragicomedy, Das Liebeskonzil, for which he served a one-year prison sentence after being convicted in Munich in 1895 on 93 counts of blasphemy. Upon his release from prison, he lived for eight years in exile, first in Zürich and later in Paris.
The Abbey in the Oakwood is an oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich. It was painted between 1809 and 1810 in Dresden and was first shown together with the painting The Monk by the Sea in the Prussian Academy of Arts exhibition of 1810. On Friedrich's request The Abbey in the Oakwood was hung beneath The Monk by the Sea. This painting is one of over two dozen of Friedrich's works that include cemeteries or graves.
The Bride of the Wind (Die Windsbraut), also called The Tempest, is a 1913–1914 painting by Oskar Kokoschka. The oil on canvas work is housed in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Kokoschka's best known work, it is an allegorical picture featuring a self-portrait by the artist, lying alongside his lover Alma Mahler.
Osmar Schindler was a German painter belonging to the Dresden Academy school of artists. His works were considered a mixture of impressionism and Art Nouveau.
The Pleyben Parish close is a historical cathedral complex at Pleyben in the Châteaulin arrondissement of Brittany in northwestern France. The enclosed paroissial comprises the parish church dedicated to Saint Germain of Auxerre, a funeral chapel/ossuary, a triumphal arch serving as the enclosed entrance, and the Calvary at Pleyben. The building is dominated by two bell towers. The rightmost, known as the Saint Germain, is in the Renaissance style and is topped by a lanterned dome; whilst the other has a Gothic style spire. Between the towers is a stair turret with pinnacles and an ornate spire. The close is a listed historical monument since 1846.
The Love Sick is an oil on canvas painting by the German expressionist painter George Grosz, executed in 1916. The unsigned work is held at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Düsseldorf. It was bought from the New York gallery owner Richard L. Feigen, in 1979.
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