This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Best known for his Dada art and caustically satirical caricature works,
Georg Ehrenfried Gross was born in Berlin in 1893, later changing his
name to George Grosz. Some consider him to be perhaps the most
outstanding caricaturist and political satirist of the period following
World War I.
His father was Karl Ehrenfried Gross, an innkeeper, and his mother’s
name was Marie Wilhelmine Luise. When George was only seven his
father died. He and his mother then lived alternately in Berlin
and Stolp, Pomerania (now Poland), where Georg started secondary school
in 1902. In 1908 he was expelled from school for disobedience
(allegedly for returning a blow he had received from a trainee
teacher).
He passed the entrance exam to study at the Royal Academy of Art in
Dresden where he specialized in graphic art, and as early as 1910 became
involved with satirical magazines.
In 1912, Grosz (then Gross) joined the graphic art course at the College
of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1913 he spent several months in
Paris at Colarossi's studio. The main subjects of his drawings of
that period were crimes, orgies, and erotic subjects. Some of his
cartoons were published in periodicals. He also did his first
book illustrations and began painting in oils.
With the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered, and served briefly as
an infantryman, but was discharged from the army several months later
following a surgical operation. 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 considered by many to be Germany's
leading social critic in the field of the visual arts. His works
demonstrating pity for the underdog and hatred of capitalism penetrated
deep into the consciousness of the postwar mentality of a Germany
suffering with inflation and political failure.
In 1916, in protest against nationalism and patriotism, he altered his
name to George Grosz. During this period in Berlin, Grosz met various
authors, artists, and intellectuals, among them those with whom he
would found the Berlin Dada in 1917.
Following the revolution in Russia, an artists' association, the
‘November Group’, was established in Berlin in 1918. Grosz joined
it, soon after becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1919 he
started a magazine called "Die Pleite’. His drawings, which were
critical of bourgeois society, appeared in various publications, and
his work often aroused scandals.
In 1920, Grosz visited Italy, and in 1922 he spent six months in
Russia. The trip disillusioned him, and, feeling out of step with
Russia's politics, Grosz resigned from the Communist party in
1923. The next year, however, he became a leader of Berlin's Rote
Gruppe (Red group), an organization of revolutionary Communist artists.
About 1925, he approached in his paintings a style that was fully
realistic and was called the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a
reaction to the expressionist trends of the era.
In his drawings, usually in pen and ink, which he sometimes developed
further with watercolor, Grosz contributed to a perception much of the
world had of Berlin in the 1920s, including corpulent businessmen,
wounded soldiers, prostitutes, and orgies. His draftsmanship was
excellent although the works he is best known for adopt a deliberately
crude form of caricature. In 1921 his album Gott mit uns (God with us) brought Grosz charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army).
In 1924, he was prosecuted for offences against public morality for his work titled Ecce Homo, which was confiscated as being pornographic. He was accused of blasphemy in 1928 for a drawing titled Shut Up and Keep Serving the Cause. All these scandals only helped increase his fame.
In 1931, a writer for the periodical Eulenspiegel wrote: "No
other German artist so consciously used art as a weapon in the fight of
the German workers during 1919 to 1923 as did George Grosz. He is
one of the first artists in Germany who consciously placed art in the
service of society."
He was bitterly anti-Nazi, and Grosz's reputation as a political
activist and deflator of German greatness was no secret.
Premonitions of disaster began to haunt him. In his autobiography
he recalled: "a studio assistant appeared in a brown shirt one day and
warned him to be careful; another time he found a threatening note next
to his easel, calling him a Jew." When in the spring of 1932 a
cable arrived from the Art Students League in New York inviting him to
teach there during the summer, he accepted immediately. After a short
return to Germany, he learned his apartment and studio had been
searched by the Gestapo, who were looking for him. He emigrated in
January 1933, together with his wife and two sons.
In the United States, both his works and behavior changed
radically---no more attacks on society, or focus on class
struggle. This resignation was not entirely sincere, however, as
he later wrote in his autobiography: “My motto was now to give offence
to none and be pleasing to all… Anyone who plans to get ahead and make
money would do well to have no character at all. The second rule
for fitting in is to think everything beautiful!
Everything, that is to say, including things that are not
beautiful in reality."
Grosz taught at the Art Students League into the 1950s. He also had a
private art school, where his students were mainly society
ladies. From 1937 to 1939, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim
fellowship, which enabled him to devote time to his own work. He
was not rich, but was comfortable. In 1937, he was included in
the noted German exhibition of ‘degenerate’ art, and in 1938 was
stripped of his German citizenship. He became an American
citizen, and the Nazis burned numerous works by him.
In 1944, he painted Cain, or Hitler in Hell, showing the dead
attacking Hitler in hell. During this period he also worked as Artist
in Residence at the Des Moines Art Center.
Grosz's artistic works during his American period are considered by
some to be less important than his teaching activities and his
autobiography, A Little Yes and Big No, published in
1946. 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.
In 1954, Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
and in 1958 to the Academy of Fine Arts of Germany. His last
works in America were collages, which partly recall his Dada period and
partly were influenced by Pop Art.
Grosz returned to Germany permanently in 1958, somewhat disillusioned
with his American interlude, having been appreciated in America
primarily as a satirist. He returned to his homeland in an
attempt to regain the momentum he had lost, but died in Berlin in a
drinking-related accident six weeks after his return.
In 1960, Grosz was the subject of an Oscar-nominated short film titled George Grosz’s Interregnum.
Sources:
websites: abcgallery.com/ Olga’s Gallery;wikipedia.com; bookrags.com; artchive.com.
| |
Biography from Galerie St. Etienne:
| Born in Berlin, George Grosz spent his early life moving with his
mother to and from Stolp, where he began private drawing lessons in
1901, after his the death of his father. He was expelled from school in
1908, but in 1909 entered the Royal Academy in Dresden, from which he
graduated with honors.
Although a large part of Grosz’s work attacks the military, the artist
initially volunteered for the army in 1914. After a year at the
Front, he suffered a nervous breakdown, which he saw as a physical and
psychological revolt against military violence. In 1917, he was
drafted back into the army, but avoided actual service, spending time
in a sanitarium instead. It was also during this year that the Malik Verlag
began publishing his graphic works.
Around the time of the 1918 November Revolution, Grosz focused his
pictorial attack on what he later termed “The Pillars of Society”: the
military, the clergy, and above all, the middle class.
It was during this period that Grosz joined the Dada movement, the
German Communist Party (KPD), and the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe,
through which he had contact with fellow members Otto Dix and Käthe
Kollwitz. Due to a mistrust of ideology in general, Grosz was not
a very active member of the KPD, but he did remain loyal to the party
for several years.
When asked to create pro-KPD posters, Grosz left in order to avoid
turning his art into propaganda. This break coincided with a 1922
visit to Moscow, where Grosz was disillusioned by the numerous social
problems he saw in the Soviet Union. However, he remained a committed
socialist, and in 1924, he became a leader of the Rote Gruppe, an
organization of left-wing, socially conscious artists.
Grosz’s constant satirical attacks on the rampant corruption in
capitalist society got him into legal trouble. In 1920, his
portfolio God on Our Side was confiscated, and Grosz was
arrested and fined for attacking the military. Two years later,
he was fined again, this time for the defamation of public morals in
his portfolio Ecce Homo.
Grosz also seems to have been acutely aware of the danger of the Nazi
Party. As early as 1925, he began ruthlessly ridiculing Adolf
Hitler and issuing increasingly strong warnings about the danger of
Nazism.
By 1929, the political climate in Germany had swung right, and Grosz
became endangered.
In 1933, as the Nazi party was voted into power, Grosz traveled to the
United Stated to teach; he ended up sending for his family and becoming
a citizen in 1938. Though Grosz was out of physical danger, his
art remained under attack. In 1937, several of his works were
hung in the “Degenerate Art” exhibit sponsored by the Nazi government.
Grosz remained in the United States until 1958, when he returned to
Germany; he died the following year in Berlin. |
Biography from a third party submitted on 06/25/2006:
| | Grosz was a keen political observer. He satirized the military, the bourgoisie and the clergy in oils, watercolors and prints as well as theatre productions. He was active in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s and came to America because of the political climate there. He returned to Germany with his wife at the end of his life. |
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