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Lot Essay
Drawn in 1941 shortly after his arrival in New York, A la Troisième Avenue belongs to George Grosz’s celebrated suite of illustrations for Ben Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons in New York. The two first met in Berlin in 1918, when Hecht—then a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News—was introduced by Grosz to the city’s avant-garde Dada circle. A lasting friendship followed, with Hecht becoming an early champion of Grosz’s work and even bringing drawings back to the United States. Their collaboration in 1941 thus reflects a longstanding artistic dialogue, culminating in Grosz’s production of 86 large-scale illustrations for Hecht’s book at the height of wartime displacement.
Depicted in the present work, M. Le Moal’s café on Third Avenue—described by Hecht as a place where “Paris still breathes”—becomes a stage for émigré life: sailors, refugees, and exiles gathered in a fragile enclave of memory and resilience. Rendered with Grosz’s incisive reed pen and ink, the composition captures both immediacy and psychological tension, exemplifying his American period at its most distilled. Combining the biting social acuity of his Berlin years with a newfound clarity of line, the work stands as a poignant record of wartime New York, where dislocation and identity converge within a quietly charged urban interior.
Depicted in the present work, M. Le Moal’s café on Third Avenue—described by Hecht as a place where “Paris still breathes”—becomes a stage for émigré life: sailors, refugees, and exiles gathered in a fragile enclave of memory and resilience. Rendered with Grosz’s incisive reed pen and ink, the composition captures both immediacy and psychological tension, exemplifying his American period at its most distilled. Combining the biting social acuity of his Berlin years with a newfound clarity of line, the work stands as a poignant record of wartime New York, where dislocation and identity converge within a quietly charged urban interior.