George Grosz - Biography

Graphic artist and painter, born in Berlin, Germany. He studied art in Dresden and Berlin and served in the German army in World War 1. After years of producing drawings that bitterly satirized middle-class complacency, militarism, and Nazism, he emigrated to New York City (1932), eventually establishing his studio on Long Island. Early associated with Dadaism, the movement that embraced the absurdity of life, he became known as the printmaker and painter who was a sophisticated realist. His later oils were more symbolic in nature. In 1959 he returned to Berlin, where he died.

George Grosz (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group, known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s.

Biography

George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany but changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic enthusiasm for America that originated in his early reading of the books of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karl May, and which he retained for the rest of his life. (His artist friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to John Heartfield at the same time.)

In 1914 Grosz voluntered for military service;

Grosz was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents; In 1921 Grosz was accused of insulting the army, which resulted in a 300 German Mark fine and the destruction of the collection Gott mit uns ("God with us"), a satire on German society. Grosz left the KPD in 1922 after having spent five months in Russia and meeting Lenin and Trotsky, because of his antagonism to any form of dictatorial authority.

In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. His oeuvre includes a few absurdist works, such as "Remember Uncle August the Happy Inventor" which has buttons sewn on it (see it here), and also includes erotica, such as these drawings in the World Museum of Erotic Art.

Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany in 1932 and was invited to teach at the Art Students' League in New York in 1933, where he would teach intermittently until 1955. Although a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s, Grosz's work turned toward a sentimental romanticism in America, a change generally seen as a decline. In the 1950s he opened a private art school at his home and also worked as Artist in Residence at the Des Moines Art Center. Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954.

In 1960, Grosz was the subject of the Oscar-nominated short film George Grosz' Interregnum. A communist, his feeling of social outrage stimulated him to produce the most biting drawings and paintings. -- Trewin Copplestone In Grosz's Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. a day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society. -- Grosz