Gothic rock bands and art Vol. 6 - (Red Lorry Yellow Lorry)

Welcome to the 2013 new set of uploads...
Shall we proceed?

Once upon a time in 1988 the Lorries released the album “Nothing Wrong” out of which came a 7” and 12” single of the track “Nothing Wrong” on the now legendary Situation Two label.

On the back side of the sleeve one could read that the image displayed on the cover is a painting of born-German, turned-American painter George Grosz, entitled “L’hommage a Oskar Panizza”(1917-1918).

George Grosz was a very influential artist who witnessed first hand the first W.W. in 1914, the changes that the German Revolution of 1918 brought and the rise of Nazism.
In his drawings we can feel the violent social attack he launched against militarism, the clergy and the middle class in post WWI Germany. In many of his caricatural drawings he shows war battle grounds in all their atrocity displaying death parades, wounded soldiers and prisoners.

In 1916 in an act of refusal towards German nationalism he changed his name’s spelling from Georg Gross to the more english name under wwhich we now know him and spoke in English publicly just to provoke his countrymen!
His influences range from Jugendstil to Italian Futurism and later on he experimented with photomontages, Dada and Expressionism. After 1924, he was qualified as a New Objectivity artist.

"L’ hommage à Oskar Panizza" (1917-1918) was done using the technique of collage and using as blood red as the dominant colour. 

It represents a hallucinatory disfigured madding crowd. In the left bottom corner the three sinister figures represent syphilis, alcooholism and pestilence while death triumphs at the middle of the composition. 

The depicted human madness may bring in mind to some of you artists like Bosch or Bruegel. 

Actually the paintings title comes from Oskar Panizza who was a psychiatrist and a -damned at his time- writer who himself was put behind bars for blasphemy, insubordination and defiance to the established order...

As you see things have not change really that much after a century!

Have a great day!