George Grosz

George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Gross in Berlin on July 26, 1893. From 1909 to 1911 he studied at the Dresden Art Academy. After graduating, he moved to Berlin in 1912, where he became a student of Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule. Even before the First World War, he produced various social studies and caricatures. After the start of the war, Grosz voluntarily joined the army as an infantryman in November 1914 in order to avoid the compulsory call-up to the front. He was discharged in May 1915 as unfit for service. As a strict opponent of war, he no longer wanted to bear a German name and called himself “George Grosz” from 1916. In 1919 he joined the KPD and the “Novembergruppe” (November Group); his art was increasingly directed against the ruling class and denounced social grievances with unmasking perspicacity. Grosz was a co-founder of the Berlin Dada movement. His first solo exhibition took place in 1920 at the Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich. Grosz’s drawings, published in anthologies, are a great success, even in circles that reject his political views. On a trip to Russia in 1922, he meets Lenin and Trotsky. His experiences in Russia strengthen his distrust of any dictatorial authority and cause him to leave the KPD. In 1932 Grosz receives a teaching position at the New York Art Students League. Due to the increasingly critical political situation in Germany, he seized the opportunity to extend his teaching assignment and moved his residence to New York in 1933. In 1937 Grosz received the Guggenheim Fellowship. At the same time, his work was branded “degenerate” in Germany and in part burned or sold cheaply abroad. In the U.S., the artist did not continue his satirical oeuvre, but initially cultivated a more naturalistic and painterly drawing in addition to watercolor, and in 1936 began to paint in oil again. In 1941 he received a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the 1950s Grosz traveled more and more frequently to Europe and in 1959 finally returned to Berlin, where he died on July 6. Today his works can be seen in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.