82.078 Boxers/ Combat Sport

c. 1922

Hand-colored lithogaph, 16 1/2 x 12 1/4" (41 x 31cm)

Signed, ll: Grossmann

Part of Die Schaffenden portfolio, II. Jg. 4 Mappe: Die Schaffenden stamp in lower left corner

Provenance: Hauswedell Auction, Hamburg, Nr. 820, May 1959

Along with several other members of the art circles he frequented, Grossmann was fascinated with the world of sports, particularly with championship boxing and wrestling. Relatively new to German audiences, boxing–especially the great bouts of the 1920s–generated immense excitement among the artistic avant-garde, who equated its aggressive athleticism with the most modern sort of artistic energy.

Grossman was particularly attracted to themes of boxing and wrestling as a means of expressing his own elitist disregard for standard German bourgeois life and aesthetic taste, as well as his disdain for the rarefied atmosphere of the avant-garde. As he himself wrote, “Riding, boxing, women–all seemed more important to me than the artistic disputes that were then nurtured in the Café du Dôme.”

An example of the kind of attitude greeted Grossmann’s aesthetic embracing of such heretofore unacceptable themes can be seen in a review of his 1922 Boxer portfolio, devoted to the German prizefighter Hans Breitensträter: “If you think it is a scandal to offer us niggers and Frenchman in art portfolios; if you are also of the opinion that this shameful smirch lies heavily on a German art institute, which should be especially mindful of encouraging and striving for a true and German art–then I can only respond: you are right!”

Despite such horrified lamentations, Gerossmann’s images, as one can recognize in this view of boxers in training, were always delicate and graceful studies of human form in motion. Grossmann’s use of pale color washes gives evidence to his relation to the Bulgarian born Jules Pascin, whose graphic hand had similar elegance.