Grosz, George

(1893–1959) graphic artist, painter; born in Berlin, Germany. He studied art in Dresden and Berlin and served in the German army in World War I. After years of producing drawings that bitterly satirized middle-class complacency, militarism, and Nazism, he emigrated to New York City in 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.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Grosz, George

(pseudonym of Georg Ehrenfried). Born July 26, 1893. in Berlin; died July 6. 1959, in West Berlin. German painter and graphic artist.

Grosz studied at the Academy of Arts in Dresden (1909–11) and at the school of industrial arts in Berlin (1911–13). From 1918 he was a member of the Communist Party of Germany, and he was the organizer of the so-called Red Group of artists (1924). In 1928, Grosz became a member of the Association of Revolutionary Artists of Germany in Berlin. For a time he was associated with Dadaism and expressionism, and he painted sharply psychological portraits in the spirit of the “new objectivity.” His graphic cycles of works (lithographs, drawings, and watercolors) became widely known. Among them are The Face of the Ruling Class (1921). Ecce Homo (1922), Retribution Will Follow! (1922–23). and The New Face of the Ruling Class (1930). Their savagely grotesque style was influenced by simple graffiti. In these works Grosz maliciously and caustically exposed the egoism, cruelty, and corruption of the bourgeoisie and the inhumanity of militarism, and he revealed the horrors of the poverty and disfranchisement of the people and the growing awareness of the working class. From 1932 to 1959, Grosz lived in the USA, where he did not participate in politics but created a number of pointedly critical social paintings (Peace, 1946, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

WORKS

A Little Yes and a Big No. New York, 1946.

REFERENCES

[S”edin. V.] Georg Gross. Moscow-Leningrad. 1931.
Lang, L. (ed.). George Grosz. Berlin. 1966.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

(44.) These were Thomas Hart Benton, Warren Chappell, John Steuart Curry, Fritz Eichenberg, George Grosz, Fritz Kredel, Allen Lewis, Boardman Robinson, William Sharp, Hugo Steiner-Prag, and Edward A.

The illustrated modern library series

John Heartfield & George Grosz, Der Kunstlump, from: Der Gegner, 1.

Between "critique" and propaganda: the critical self-understanding of art in the historical avant-garde. The case of Dada

Random homicides and targeted political assassinations turned the streets of Berlin into what George Grosz called "wild ravines haunted by murderers and cocaine pedlars, their emblem a metal bar or a murderous broken-off chair leg." As the popular sentiment, along with the wheels of justice, turned toward the right, the number of politically motivated killings increased.

Berlin stories: the caustic energy of Weimar art

It is "George Grosz," by the worthy Else Lasker-Schuler (1869-1945), who was, for a while, the painter's mistress.

The three Ms of German poetry

(1) Me he tomado la libertad de inventar algunos adjetivos haciendo referencia a Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, George Grosz y Joan Miro.

Travesias interiores: Alvaro Galindo

The prints remind me a bit of German expressionist George Grosz.

When small is better: Galleries show tiny treasures

At first primarily a literary journal featuring writers like Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler and Thomas Mann, it later became celebrated more for its pictorial satires by George Grosz, Olaf Gulbransson, Karl Arnold, Erich Schilling and others.

The barbed wit of Weimar: Mark Bryant continues his exploration of significant cartoons and caricature with a look at a German magazine that published some of the bravest satirical critiques of Hitler, bitterly attacking Nazism until 1933, and still published to the last years of the war

He was not an overtly political artist with Communist sympathies, like George Grosz or John Heartfield.

An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938

PoMo rapidly became a style in which Classical motifs became more and more stretched over essentially dull and reductive Modernist buildings that occasionally grin through their decorative skins, like the skull emerging through the face of a beauty in a George Grosz portrait.

Death of high Modernism; Escaping from the grey: Regionalism and the pursuit of roots; High-Tech; PoMo and neo Neo-Classicism

Artists represented include Kathe Hollwitz, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, George Grosz, Lionel Feininger among a wide range of artists whose work spans the the years between the Second Empire and the rise of the Nazis.

German Expressionist Prints