Explore the Context of this artwork, The Love Sick.
Grosz, after serving in the German Army since 1914, would be dismissed on 11 May 1915, for medical reasons. He worked frantically from July 1915 until January 1917, when he was drafted for service, in his workshop and home located in Berlin, at the Stephanstrasse. In a protest against the anti-English attitude of his compatriots, he joined the Spartacist League (predecessor of the German Communist Party) and anglicized his name from Georg Groß to the English George Grosz.
After having produced two interior paintings of a café (Das Kaffeehaus (1915/1916) and Café (1916)), the painter then created The Love Sick simultaneously and in a direct link with Suicide (Tate Gallery, London), where he also depicts himself, dead from a gunshot. The two works have the same dimension (99.7 × 76.5 cm) and are a sort of pendant.
George Grosz Berlin Tate Tate Gallery London