GEORGE GROSZ — His Visual and Theatrical Politics, Moeller Fine Art, New York, 2005

Issued for Moeller Fine Art's 2005 exhibition George Grosz: His Visual and Theatrical Politics, New York, 27 October–23 December 2005. Large folded exhibition and performance card, 20 × 25 cm; offset printing in red, sage green, white and black.

Grosz understood Berlin as theatre long before political art became a category. Between 1919 and 1930, Grosz worked on nearly a dozen theatrical productions. The decisive relationship was with Erwin Piscator, whose radical theatre treated projection, film, machinery and montage as political material. For The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, Grosz designed sets, costumes, projected drawings and enormous cut-out figures sent mechanically across the stage. His caricatures had begun to move: drawing → newspaper → stage → projection → political theatre.

The 2005 exhibition recovered that circuitry through roughly seventy drawings and watercolours from 1914–30, including a group connected to Schwejk. Grosz's businessmen, soldiers, bureaucrats and opportunists appear less like portraits than a recurring cast. Berlin becomes scenery. Society performs itself.

The card understands this perfectly. Closed, it is almost mannered: muted sage green, generous space, GEORGE GROSZ stretched across the field in red and white. Open it and the temperature changes completely. The green exterior gives way to saturated red. Opposite it, a Grosz figure appears in black and white: swollen, suited, pipe in hand, lodged inside the fractured geometry of the city. Respectability outside. Grotesque inside. The fold becomes a curtain.

Moeller extended the exhibition into performance with Good-bye Trouble: George Grosz, Erwin Piscator, and the Roaring ’20s in Berlin, directed by Gregorij H. von Leïtis, with performances on Sundays at 5pm on 30 October and 6, 13 and 20 November. The card therefore did more than announce an exhibition about Grosz's theatrical politics. It circulated between exhibition and performance, returning the drawings to the culture of stage, cabaret and political spectacle from which they had emerged.

This copy has undergone another transformation. Its sage-green cover has been slowly washed by light, producing a pale, uneven field across the surface while the protected red interior remains remarkably saturated. The fading is visible but strangely elegant: exposure has divided the card into two temporal zones. Outside, time has worked on the colour. Inside, the scene is still waiting. This is not a pristine survivor pretending not to have had a life. The object records its own duration — displayed, exposed, retained.

Condition: fair. The exterior carries a pronounced atmospheric veil of sun-fading across the original sage-green field, with light handling and surface wear from circulation and display. The protected interior retains its much deeper original colour. Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.