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George Grosz
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(b Berlin, 26 July 1893; d W. Berlin, 6 July 1959). German painter, draughtsman and illustrator. He is particularly valued for his caustic caricatures, in which he used the reed pen with notable success. Although his paintings are not quite as significant as his graphic art, a number of them are, nonetheless, major works. He grew up in the provincial town of Stolp, Pomerania (now Slupsk, Poland), where he attended the Oberrealschule, until he was expelled for disobedience. From 1909 to 1911 he attended the Akademie der K?nste in Dresden, where he met Kurt G?nther, Bernhard Kretschmar (1889-1972) and Franz Lenk (b 1898). Under his teacher Richard M?ller (1874-1954), Grosz painted and drew from plaster casts. At this time he was unaware of such avant-garde movements as Die Br?cke, also active in Dresden. In 1912 he studied with Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. A year later he moved to the Acad?mie Colarossi in Paris, where he learnt a free drawing style that swiftly reached the essence of a motif.
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| Biography: George Grosz |
The German painter and graphic artist George Grosz (1893-1959) was the most outstanding caricaturist and political satirist of the period after World War I.
George Grosz was born on July 26, 1893, in Berlin. He studied at the art academies of Dresden (1909) and Berlin (1911) and visited Paris (1913). He started his career as a cartoonist for humoristic reviews such as Ulk and Lustige Blätter; his concern for the actualities of the day was even then predominant.
During World War I Grosz was an infantryman in the German army. About 1916 he began to portray with biting satire the militarism and ruthlessness of the ruling classes. In Berlin in 1917 he joined the Dada movement, which was essentially a protest against war and exploitation and a call for a new humanism. By 1918 he was acknowledged as Germany's leading social critic in the field of the visual arts, whose pity for the underdog and hatred of capitalism penetrated deep into the consciousness of the postwar mentality in a Germany riddled by misery, inflation, and political failure.
Grosz's lithographic series in particular made him internationally known. His style was quite novel in the history of modern draftsmanship. His most famous series are Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (1919), Abrechnung folgt and Ecce Homo (both 1922), Spiesser Spiegel (1924), and Das neue Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse and Die Gezeichneten (both 1930). Only the work of the German painter Otto Dix could compare with the acidity, the fantastic aggressiveness, and the determination of Grosz to unmask the social lie, the cruelty of war, and the depraved moral code.
In 1920 Grosz visited Italy, and in 1922 he spent 6 months in Russia. About 1925 he approached in his paintings a style that was utterly realistic; it was called the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and it was a reaction to the expressionist trends of the era. This is exemplified in his portrait of Max Hermann Neisse (1927).
In 1932 Grosz accepted an invitation by the Art Students League of New York City to teach there. The following year he opened an art school, which he conducted until 1937. That year he was included in the German exhibition of "degenerate" art; a year later he was deprived of his German citizenship and became an American citizen. Grosz taught at the School of Fine Arts, Columbia University (1941-1942). For a short time he painted landscapes and figural compositions with nudes, but he soon returned to works in a social realist mode. He died in Berlin on July 6, 1959.
Further Reading
Grosz's A Little Yes and a Big No (1946) is his autobiography. Herbert Bittner, ed., George Grosz (1961), includes an essay by the artist, "On My Drawings." John I. H. Baur, George Grosz (1954), is a study of the artist's work deepened by psychological insight. The artistic climate in which Grosz worked is described in Franz Roh, German Art in the 20th Century (1968). Reproductions of his work are in Arts Council of Great Britain, George Grosz, 1893-1959 (1963).
Additional Sources
Flavell, M. Kay (Mary Kay), George Grosz, a biography, New Haven:Yale University Press, 1988.
George Grosz:his life and work, New York:Universe Books, 1979.
Grosz, George, The autobiography of George Grosz:a small yes and a big no, London; New York:Allison & Busby, 1982.
Grosz, George, George Grosz, an autobiography, New York: Macmillan, 1983.
| German Literature Companion: George Grosz |
Grosz, George, assumed name of Georg Ehrenfried (Berlin, 1893-1959, Berlin), a painter and a brilliant cartoonist who satirized the military, the industrialists, and the bourgeoisie. His cartoons more than once brought him into conflict with the law. His first collection of lithographs, Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (1917), created during his association with Dada (see Dadaismus), achieved its third edition in 1923. Other collections include the graphic drawings Kleine Groszmappe (1920), Ecce Homo (1922), and the painting Kaltes Buffet (1930). Much of his work of this period is associated with Neue Sachlichkeit. After his emigration in 1932 to the USA, Grosz, who was also active as a book illustrator, largely abandoned his satirical style. He entitled his autobiography A little Yes and a big No (1946; Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein, 1955). He died shortly after his return to Berlin in 1959. An edition by H. Sahl, Das neue Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse, appeared in 1966; Grosz's correspondence with Sahl,
| Columbia Encyclopedia: George Grosz |
Grosz, George (grōs), 1893-1959, German-American caricaturist, draughtsman, and painter, b. Berlin. Before and during World War I he contributed drawings on proletarian themes to Illustration and other German periodicals. He was associated with the Dada group at that time. In postwar Germany, Grosz was famous for his vitriolic, satirical drawings attacking the corruption of German bourgeois society. On three occasions he was brought to trial by the state for allegedly defaming public morals and for blasphemy. In his caricatures he evoked a nightmare world, an inferno, made credible with a few jagged pen-and-ink lines. In 1924, Grosz began to paint, and in 1933 he accepted a position as art instructor at the Art Students League, New York City. He became a U.S. citizen in 1938. At first the fiery work of his German period was supplanted by a more traditional rendering of figures and landscapes. However, World War II impelled him to create a symbolic series of ravaged figures. His drawing Street Scene (Philadelphia Mus. of Art) is characteristic. Other works are at the Museum of Modern Art. Two collections of his drawings were published in 1944.
Bibliography
See his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No (tr. 1946) and Ecce Homo (new ed. 1966); biographies by H. Hess (1985) and M. K. Flavell (1988).
| Quotes By: George Grosz |
Quotes:
"The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the genius of the personage, the greater the profit."
"The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, culture. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing art to defend their collapsing culture."
| Wikipedia: George Grosz |
| George Grosz | |
 George Grosz in 1921 |
|
| Birth name | Georg Ehrenfried Groß |
| Born | July 26, 1893 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | July 6, 1959 (aged 65) Berlin, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Field | Painting, drawing |
| Training | Dresden Academy |
| Movement | Dada, New Objectivity |
| Works | The Funeral (Dedicated to Oscar Panizza) |
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.
Contents |
Biography
George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany but changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic enthusiasm for America[1] 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.[2] (His artist friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to John Heartfield at the same time.)
Grosz grew up in the Pomeranian town of Stolp,[3] where his mother became the keeper of the local Hussar's Officers' mess after his father died in 1901.[4][5] In 1914 Grosz volunteered for military service; like many other artists, he embraced the first world war as "the war to end all wars", but he was quickly disillusioned and was given a discharge after hospitalization in 1915. In January 1917 he was drafted for service, but in May he was discharged as permanently unfit.[6]
Grosz was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents; he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the same year. 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.
Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power. In the summer of 1932, he was invited to teach at the Art Students League of New York, where he would teach intermittently until 1955. Grosz became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1938, and made his home in Bayside, New York.
In America, Grosz determined to make a clean break with his past, and changed his style and subject matter.[7] He continued to exhibit regularly, and in 1946 he published his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. 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. Though he had US citizenship, he resolved to return to Berlin, where he died on July 6, 1959 from the effects of falling down a flight of stairs after a night of drinking.[8]
In 1960, Grosz was the subject of the Oscar-nominated short film George Grosz' Interregnum. In 2002, actor Kevin McKidd portrayed Grosz in a supporting role as an eager artist seeking exposure in a fictional film entitled Max, regarding Adolf Hitler's youth.
Works
Although Grosz made his first oil paintings in 1912 while still a student,[9] his earliest oils that can be identified today date from 1916.[10] By 1914, Grosz worked in a style influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration, graffiti, and children's drawings.[11] Sharply outlined forms are often treated as if transparent. The City (1916–17) was the first of his many paintings of the modern urban scene.[12] Other examples include the apocalyptic Explosion (1917), Metropolis (1917), and The Funeral, a 1918 painting depicting a mad funeral procession.
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. Corpulent businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects. His draftsmanship was excellent although the works he is best known for adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature. His oeuvre includes a few absurdist works, such as Remember Uncle August the Unhappy Inventor which has buttons sewn on it,[13] and also includes a number of erotic artworks.[14]
After his emigration to the USA in 1933, Grosz "sharply rejected [his] previous work, and caricature in general."[15] 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."[16] 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.[17]
Quotes
- A deeply disillusioned man, he saw humanity as essentially bestial and the city of Berlin as a sink of depravity and deprivation, its streets crowded with unprincipled profiteers, prostitutes, war-crippled dregs and a variety of perverts. 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. 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
- My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... 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
See also
- The Funeral (Grosz); one of Grosz' most famous paintings.
- Jedermann sein eigner Fussball; an artists' book by George Grosz and John Heartfield.
- Berlin Dada; an art movement from 1917-1921 centred around Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hannah Hoch.
- New Objectivity; an art movement from the 1920s centred around Grosz, Christian Schad and Otto Dix.
Notes
- ^ Sabarsky 1985, p.250.
- ^ Schmied 1978, p.29.
- ^ munzinger.de
- ^ henze-ketterer.ch
- ^ zeit.de
- ^ Sabarsky 1985, p. 26. According to Sabarsky, no records can be found to substantiate the version of events described by Grosz in his autobiography, i.e., that he was accused of desertion and narrowly avoided execution.
- ^ Grosz 1946, pp. 301–302.
- ^ Kranzfelder 2005, p. 90-93.
- ^ Kranzfelder 2005, p. 92.
- ^ Kranzfelder 2005, p. 21.
- ^ Kranzfelder 2005, p. 15.
- ^ Kranzfelder 2005, p. 22.
- ^ "Remember Uncle August the Unhappy Inventor". centrepompidou.fr. http://www.centrepompidou.fr/images/oeuvres/XL/3I01508.jpg. Retrieved 2008-04-01.
- ^ "George Grosz erotic artwork". AMEA/World Museum of Erotic Art. http://www.ameanet.org/memberz/grosz/. Retrieved 2008-04-02.
- ^ Grosz 1946, p. 276.
- ^ Grosz 1946, p. 270.
- ^ Michalsky 1994, pp. 35-36.
References
- Grosz, George (1946). A Little Yes and a Big No. New York: The Dial Press.
- Kranzfelder, Ivo (2005). George Grosz. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-0891-1
- Michalski, Sergiusz (1994). New Objectivity. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-9650-0
- Sabarsky, Serge, editor (1985). George Grosz: The Berlin Years. New York: Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-0668-5
- Schmied, Wieland (1978). Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. ISBN 0-7287-0184-7
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Mentioned in
- Photomontage (art)
- Museum of Modern Art: George Grosz - In America (Visual Arts Film)
- new objectivity (movement, Germany – in art)
- Tony (Peter) Smith (art)
- Neue Sachlichkeit
- Neue Sachlichkeit (art)
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- John Heartfield, Fotomonteur (1977 Film)
- Max Beckmann (German painter)
- Paul Citroen (art)
- Ana Eckell (art)
- Ugly Realism (art)
- Dada (movement, Europe – in art, literature)
- Hans Sahl (person)
