The Funeral

The Funeral (often The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza)) is a painting by the German Expressionist artist George Grosz, completed between 1917 and 1918. The work combines elements of Futurism and Cubism to show a funeral procession in a modern urban city, as an infernal abyss populated by twisted and grotesque attendants. The painting is dedicated to the German psychiatrist and avant-garde writer Oskar Panizza, noted for his play Liebeskonzil, which draws on the first historically documented outbreak of syphilis and depicts God the Father as a senile old man. Although Panizza's works, in which he rejected all militarism and religious authority, were deemed blasphemous by both the Church and the government of Emperor Wilhelm II, they were later admired by Grosz and other idealists of his generation.