Peace, II
1946

Although he is best known for the biting works about Weimar culture that he completed in the wake of World War I, while still living in his native Germany, George Grosz produced a number of apocalyptic images in the late 1930s and 1940s that reflect the atrocities of World War II—especially their toll on the individual. Peace, II is a distinctly autobiographical painting in this vein. Grosz immigrated to America in 1933, as Nazis raided his studio in Berlin; his mother, who remained in Germany, died during the war. Here the artist depicts himself as a survivor in an otherwise ruined world, creating a meditation on loss and an image of mourning for his mother as well as his homeland.