Weiblicher Akt

George Grosz (1893-1959)

‘Weiblicher Akt’

Dresden-Berlin, c 1912
Ink on Paper


Height: 23 cm
Width: 28,3 cm

H 9 x W 11 1/8 inch












This early work by George Grosz offers a striking glimpse into the gestation of one of the 20th century’s most scathing visual satirists. Weiblicher Akt (Female Nude), drawn circa 1912 while Grosz was still a student, is deceptively simple in medium—ink on paper—yet rich in implication. It represents a moment when the young artist was already moving away from academic formalism, embracing instead a more expressive, unsparing approach to the human figure.

At first glance, the work reads as a standard academic nude: a reclining female form, positioned horizontally across the paper. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that Grosz is doing more than studying anatomy. The line is restless, sharp, and almost impatient; the contours of the body seem exaggerated rather than idealised. The breasts are rendered in a cartoonish fashion—bulbous and outsized—and the expression of the figure veers toward mockery rather than serenity. The result is a portrait that resists passivity. This is not a classical nude, but a body filtered through the lens of scepticism, even cynicism.

Grosz made this prior to his involvement with Dada and New Objectivity, this piece nonetheless anticipates the critical edge and mordant humour that would come to define his mature style. In 1912, Grosz was absorbing a range of influences—from German Expressionism to Symbolist illustration and early modernist caricature. Yet even among his contemporaries, few artists turned the human form into a site of such intense moral inquiry. Here, the act of drawing a nude is not neutral or reverential—it becomes an interrogation of both subject and viewer.

This period in Grosz’s career was marked by disillusionment with traditional modes of beauty and representation. Germany, on the brink of World War I, was already a society in flux: industrialising, fragmenting, and riddled with class tensions. Grosz’s experiences as a student in Berlin, his exposure to the city’s street life, and his instinctive distrust of authority fed into his aesthetic. Weiblicher Akt seems to bear this out—not merely as a student exercise, but as a proto-satirical work in which the body becomes a surface onto which social tensions are inscribed.

It is also significant that the figure appears self-aware—almost complicit in her own theatricality. The smirk, the casual sprawl, the slight contortion of proportions: all these suggest a subject who is not passive but knowingly exaggerated. This play with distortion would become one of Grosz’s most powerful tools, later used to portray the corruption of soldiers, the decadence of businessmen, and the hypocrisies of Weimar bourgeois society.

In this context, Weiblicher Akt stands not only as a representation of the female body, but as a foundational sketch in the evolution of Grosz’s political and artistic voice. His use of ink—fluid, unforgiving, and immediate—reinforces the drawing’s confrontational tone. Every stroke here feels deliberate, even if dashed off with a sense of improvisation. There is no effort to conceal the grotesque; instead, it is brought to the fore, demanding recognition.
Ultimately, this early drawing is not merely an academic exercise but a prelude to a visual rebellion. Grosz would soon abandon any lingering allegiance to classical composition, embracing the collage, the grotesque, and the political cartoon. Yet even in Weiblicher Akt, the seeds of that rupture are clearly visible. The human body, in his hands, is no longer sacred—it is staged, scrutinised, and, perhaps most importantly, made strange.