Rudolf Großmann

Under the illustrious title Cocaine. Eine Orgie des modernen Lebens (Cocaine: An Orgy of Modern Life), Großmann assembled twelve hand-coloured lithographs in a portfolio in 1924. Ten of them form part of the MNK collection. Bars, nightlife, music and dance, the black market, boxing, but also a supervisory board meeting or a quasi-paradisiacal scene – titled Insel der Seligen (Island of the Blesséd) – in which scantily-clad people loll about in a natural setting, seemingly transported from earthly concerns, are assembled by Großmann to create a tableau of the 'Golden Twenties'. An image that is both attractive and repulsive at the same time. Here the easy life, the fun, liberation from social mores, there the excess, the dependency, both on people and on cocaine, which was easily available and widespread, especially in Berlin in the 1920s.