George Grosz (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German
artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in
the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity
group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in
1933. After his emigration to the USA in 1933, Grosz "sharply rejected
[his] previous work, and caricature in general."In place of his earlier
corrosive vision of the city, he now painted conventional nudes and many
landscape watercolors. More acerbic works, such as Cain, or Hitler in Hell
(1944), were the exception. In his autobiography, he wrote: "A great deal
that had become frozen within me in Germany melted here in America and I
rediscovered my old yearning for painting. I carefully and deliberately destroyed
a part of my past." 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.
“My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon… . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands… I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket… I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.” [George Grosz]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grosz
The Grey Man Dances, 1949
Suicide, 1926
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| The Painter of the Hole II, 1950 |
Hitler In Hell, 1944
In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art. Robert Hughes
The Pillars of Society, 1926
“I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never
did, either.” George Grosz
The lovesick man, 1916
The Survivor, 1944
After serving during I World War, Grosz settled in Berlin
and joined the Dada movement. Far more political than their counterparts in
Zurich or Paris, the Berlin Dadaists turned their art against local figures and
institutions of authority. In paintings, watercolors, and collages, Grosz mixed
the schematic simplicities of popular illustration with Expressionist
distortion, Futurist fragmentation, and the mordant accuracy of the realism
known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). In Grosz’s art, the modern
city is a hellish, jostling place overpopulated by swinish capitalists, brutish
soldiers, and degraded workers. Women are prostitutes or nouveaux riches hags.
When Johnny
Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my Südende studio at five o’clock one
May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities,
nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in
life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it. On a piece of
cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song
books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from
picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would
have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.
George Grosz,
1928
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