Jonk the Killer, 1916

A world gone made with horror and abysmal dark, bizarre, weird and relentless, brought to paper in pen and ink with precisely placed, dense linework—this is how the graphic artist, painter and cartoonist George Grosz (1893–1959), in his 1916 drawing Jonk the Killer, depicts a gruesome scene: thrown down on a chaise longue positioned diagonally in the room lies a decapitated bloodied female dead body, turned on its side. Her arms drawn up over the bare chest, the twisted legs in stockings and panties testify to a horrific violent crime. Next to the murdered woman’s body lies, amid this orderly bourgeois setting, the bloodstained axe. The room, divided by a folding screen, offers a view of the rotund-bonhomous figure of a man with his suspenders hanging down from his waist, who washes his hands, calmly and routinely, as if going about his everyday business. Shrewdly shifted perspectives in the depiction of the wooden floor, small pieces of furniture, and the angled corner of the room reinforce the effect of utter disinhibition and a decayed value system. With sparing and sure linework, Grosz concentrates, centered in the vertical paper format, the laconic and poignant depiction of unspeakable depravity.

MH, 2021