Interregnum by Grosz, George

19 pp. introductory essay by John Dos Passos, followed by a suite of 64 black and white hand-struck lithographs depicting the interrogation and torture of political prisoners in concentration camps established after Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor. List of plates. Light edgewear and very minor soiling. Folio. Cloth-backed faux wood-grained boards publisher's box, plates loose as issued, housed within newer custom clamshell box. Board edges with rubbing to edges, minor soiling, box with minor splits and possible minor prior repair work. New York (Black Sun Press) 1936. Limited edition, first printing, with faux-color lithograph signed by Grosz hinged to inside of front board. In a 2013 article in Duke University's New German Critique, James A. Van Dyke wrote of this portfolio: "Grosz's drawings, compared with other representations of the camps in the mainstream press and by left-wing artists, are distinguished by their treatment of the masculinities of both the perpetrators and the victims. Gay Nazis, frequently evoked by the left-wing press in the early 1930s, abuse impotent antifascist intellectuals, incessantly ridiculed by Grosz in his letters. Thus the article concludes that the portfolio not only offered a mordant critique of Nazi brutality but also dismissed. European civilization. Both Nazi perpetrators and their victims embodied perverse or abject masculinities that Grosz, who portrayed himself as a priapic heterosexual artist in the American landscape, rejected." A short film based on the portfolio was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1960.
Although the justification page states that the run was limited to 280 numbered copies and 20 lettered copies hors commerce, according to the Museum of Modern Art only approximately 42 total copies were issued.