Jeunesse dorée

Like an illustration from some contemporary novel of corruption and exploitation Jeunesse dorée (Golden Youth) is a sharply observed and sumptuously detailed watercolour that defines an entire era. Painted in 1922, this work, like a modern-day Hogarth describes a simple narrative encapsulating the all-pervasive decadence of contemporary Germany at the height of the inflation years in the aftermath of the First World War. This was a time when the entire country was plunged into social, moral and economic chaos, when corruption and vice ran rife and when as the writer Stefan Zweig recalled, 'the unemployed stood around by the thousands and shook their fists at the profiteers and the foreigners in their luxurious cars who bought whole rows of streets like a box of matches... everyone who could read or write traded, speculated and profited and had a secret sense that they were deceiving themselves and were being deceived by a hidden force which brought about chaos deliberately... All values were changed... the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world... a kind of madness gained hold particularly in the bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakeable in their probity. Young girls bragged proudly of their perversion, to be sixteen and still under suspicion of virginity would have been considered a disgrace in any school in Berlin at that time, every girl wanted to be able to tell of her adventures and the more exotic the better.' (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, New York, 1943, pp. 313-4)

The title Jeunesse dorée refers to the young blond-haired girl, dressed in her underwear in what appears to be the middle of the afternoon, and whose golden years of youth are being wasted on the entertainment of sleazy and corrupt elder men of the kind shown here seated before her in rapt attention, waiting on her every word. In the foreground wearing a hairnet is the unmistakable and pimp-like figure of the 'Profiteering Jew' - an almost stereotypical figure of popular folklore at this time - adopted and vilified by the Nazis as a scapegoat for all of Germany's ills. Next to him sits a typical fat capitalist, - the equally hated figure of the German Left - with alcohol-bloated face, almost drooling at the prospect of getting his hands on this young girl.

These three figures outline a circle of corruption and exploitation at the heart of a sumptuously-decorated modern interior that looks out on to the cold light of day and the austere order and grandeur of the city's architecture. With its rich colour, sharply observed detail and cold dispassionate matter-of-fact presentation this socio-critical or Verist work can be seen as one of the earliest indicators of the new sachlich or objective tendency then emerging in modern German art.