?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
GEORGE GROSZ Birth of a Nazi.
Pen and ink with correction fluid on cream wove paper, 1941. 566x480 mm; 22 3/8x18 7/8inches. Titled and dedicated "to Ben Hecht 1001 Afternoon" in pencil, lower margin, and inscribed "p. 228" in pencil, upper left. With the artist's signature ink stamp, lower right recto, and the George Grosz Nachlass ink stamp and identification number 4-52-4 in ink, lower left verso.
This is an illustration design for same-titled short story which appeared in the anthology of Hecht's newspaper columns from PM, a pre-World War II anti-isolationist Manhattan newspaper. The anthology, 1001 Afternoons in New York, was illustrated by Grosz.
Ex-collection Ben Hecht, New York; sold Sotheby's London, "Impressionist & Modern Art," October 23, 1996, lot 278; Richard Cohn, New York; sold Swann Galleries, New York, "Works of Art on Paper," May 14, 1998, sale 1791, lot 358; private collection, Southfield, Michigan.
Born in New York, Hecht (1893-1964) was a prominent novelist and playwright. Though initially a journalist, Hecht spent a year in Berlin in 1921 and there was inspired to write his first novels, including 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, 1922. Like Grosz (1893-1959, see lot 303), Hecht became an outspoken opponent of Nazism and was also a leading advocate of the dissident underground Zionist organization "Irgun Zevai Leumml."
