Grosz, George

Grosz, George (1893–1959). German-born painter and draughtsman who became an American citizen in 1938. He was born in Berlin and studied drawing at the Dresden Academy, 1909–11, and the School of Arts and Crafts, Berlin, 1912–14. In 1914 he enlisted in the army, but he was discharged on medical grounds the following year (he was called up again in 1917, but again discharged as unfit). The war instilled in him a hatred of the Prussian military caste, which he attacked mercilessly in his work—the most famous of the satirical anti-war illustrations he made at this time is the drawing Fit for Active Service (MOMA, New York, 1918), in which a fat, complacent doctor pronounces a skeleton fit for duty. In 1917, with Heartfield, he anglicized his name (adding an ‘e’ to Georg) as a protest against the hatred being whipped up against the enemy, and he became overwhelmed with loathing for his countrymen: ‘To be German means invariably to be crude, stupid, ugly, fat and inflexible—it means being unable to climb a ladder at forty, to be badly dressed—to be a German means to be a reactionary of the worst kind; it means only one amongst a hundred will, occasionally, wash all over.’

From 1917 to 1920 Grosz was a prominent figure in the Dada movement in Berlin, and in the 1920s, with Dix, he became the leading exponent of the Neue Sachlichkeit. In 1917 he published the first of several collections of drawings, through which he established an international reputation. The most famous are Das Geschicht der herrschenden Klasse (‘The Face of the Ruling Class', 1921) and Ecce Homo (1927). In these and in his paintings he ruthlessly denounced a decaying society in which gluttony and depraved sensuality are placed beside poverty and disease; prostitutes and profiteers were frequently among his cast of characters. Grosz often used watercolour, and in spite of the nastiness of the subject-matter and the bluntness of his satire, his works in this medium are remarkable for the sheer beauty and delicacy of their technique. His more conventional works of this time include a number of portraits, of which the best known is probably that of the poet Max Hermann-Neisse (Kunsthalle, Mannheim, 1925), which rivals Dix's portraits in incisiveness.

Grosz was prosecuted several times for obscenity and blasphemy, and in 1933, despairing of the political situation in Germany, he moved to the USA to take up the offer of a teaching post at the Art Students League of New York. (He had joined the Communist Party in 1918 and after he left Germany he was described as ‘Cultural Bolshevist Number One'.) In America Grosz largely abandoned his satirical manner for more romantic landscapes and still-lifes, with from time to time apocalyptic visions of a nightmare future. Although he won several honours in the last decade of his life, he regarded himself as a failure because he was unable to win recognition as a serious painter rather than a brilliant satirist, and he painted several self-portraits showing how isolated and depressed he was in his adopted country (The Wanderer, Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York, 1943). His autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No, was published in New York in 1946. He returned to Berlin in 1959, saying ‘my American dream turned out to be a soap bubble', and died there shortly after his arrival following a fall down a flight of stairs.