George Grosz
The satirist of Berlin.
George Grosz drew greedy capitalists, military men and prostitutes in Weimar Berlin. He emigrated to the United States in 1933.
George Grosz was born Georg Groß in Berlin in 1893 and grew up in Pomerania. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and then in Berlin, and early on began drawing cartoons for newspapers. During the First World War he served for a short time but suffered a breakdown. In 1916, as a protest, he began spelling his name in English, in the midst of the anti-British wartime mood.
After the war he became one of the most aggressive members of Berlin Dada and joined the Communist Party. His drawings show a Berlin full of fat industrialists, brutal officers, priests, war invalids and prostitutes. The line is thin, sharp and almost childlike, and he borrowed from graffiti and children's drawings. The portfolio The Face of the Ruling Class of 1921 is one of the best-known examples.
In the 1920s he belonged to the Neue Sachlichkeit. The painting Pillars of Society of 1926, with a lawyer, a journalist, a politician and a priest with empty or open heads, is in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Grosz was put on trial several times, for insulting the army and for blasphemy, including for a drawing of Christ in a gas mask. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1922 he became disillusioned with communism and eventually left the party.
In early 1933, shortly before the Nazis came to power, he emigrated to the United States. There he taught at the Art Students League in New York. His American art became gentler and more traditional, with landscapes and nude studies, but during the war he also painted dark, apocalyptic pictures. In Germany his art was branded degenerate.
In 1959 he moved back to Berlin but died there only a few weeks later after a fall. Grosz is regarded as one of the foremost satirical draughtsmen of the 20th century and as the sharpest critic of Weimar society.