George Grosz (; German: [ɡʁoːs] ; born Georg Ehrenfried Groß; July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at the Art Students League of New York. In 1959 he returned to Berlin, where he died shortly afterwards.
Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, the third child of a pub owner. His parents were devoutly Lutheran. Grosz grew up in the Pomeranian town of Stolp, Prussia/Free State of Prussia (now Słupsk, Poland). After his father's death in 1900, he moved to the Wedding district of Berlin with his mother and sisters. At the urging of his cousin, the young Grosz began attending a weekly drawing class taught by a local painter named Grot. Grosz developed his skills further by drawing meticulous copies of the drinking scenes of Eduard von Grützner, and by drawing imaginary battle scenes. He was expelled from school in 1908 for insubordination.
From 1909 to 1911, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Raphael Wehle, and Osmar Schindler. His first published drawing was in the satirical magazine Ulk in 1910. From 1912 until 1917 he studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik. He began painting in oils in 1912.Daum marries her pedantic automaton George in May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it, Berlinische Galerie
In November 1914 Grosz volunteered for military service, in the hope that by thus preempting conscription he would avoid being sent to the front. He was given a discharge after hospitalization for sinusitis in 1915. In 1916 he changed the spelling of his name to "de-Germanise" and internationalise his name – thus Georg became "George" (an English spelling), while in his surname he replaced the German "ß" with its phonetic equivalent "sz". He did this as a protest against German nationalism and out of a romantic enthusiasm for America – a legacy of his early reading of the books of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karl May – that he retained for the rest of his life. His artist friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld likewise changed his name to John Heartfield at the same time.
In January 1917 Grosz was drafted for service, but in May he was discharged as permanently unfit.
Political engagement (1918-1920)
Following the November Revolution in the last months of 1918, Grosz joined the Spartacist League, which was renamed the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918. He was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents. In 1920, he married Eva Peters.
In the same year, he published a collection of his drawings, titled Gott mit uns (lit."God [is] with us"), a satire on German society. Grosz was accused of insulting the army, which resulted in a 300 German Mark fine and the confiscation of the plates used to print the album. He also organised and exhibited at the First International Dada Fair.
In 1922, Grosz traveled to Russia with the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexø. Upon their arrival in Murmansk, they were briefly arrested as spies. After their credentials were approved, they were allowed to continue their journey. He met with several Bolshevik leaders such as Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, and Vladimir Lenin. He went with Arthur Holitscher to meet Anatoly Lunacharsky with whom he discussed Proletkult. He rejected the concept of "proletarian culture", arguing that the term proletarian meant uneducated and uncultured. He regarded artistic talent as a "gift of the muses", which a person may be lucky enough to be born with. There he also met the Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin.
Grosz's six-month stay in the Soviet Union left him unimpressed by what he had seen. He ended his membership in the KPD in 1923, although his political positions were little changed.
According to Grosz's son Martin Grosz, during the 1920s Nazi officers visited Grosz's studio looking for him, but because he was wearing a working man's apron Grosz was able to pass himself off as a handyman and avoid being taken into custody. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.
On December 10, 1928, he and his publisher Wieland Herzfelde were prosecuted and fined under charges of blasphemy and sacrilege for publishing two anticlerical drawings in his portfolio Hintergrund (Background). One depicted prisoners under assault from a minister who vomits grenades and weapons onto them, and another featured a crucified Christ wearing a World War I gas mask and combat boots.
According to historian David Nash, Grosz "publicly stated that he was neither Christian nor pacifist, but was actively motivated by an inner need to create these pictures". He and his publisher appealed twice, and were finally acquitted in 1929 by the Reichsgericht in Berlin. "The judge decided that it was not an offense to religion, but actually was an attack on militarism. The implication is that, from Grosz’s point of view, religion was being used as essentially an opiate of the masses to encourage soldiers to die for the state. 'Shut up and obey,' was the rubric associated with this," according to art critic Camille Paglia.
In 1942, Time magazine identified Grosz as a pacifist.
Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany shortly before Hitler came to power. In June 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach the summer semester at the Art Students League of New York. In October 1932, Grosz returned to Germany, but on January 12, 1933, he and his family emigrated to the United States. Their ship docked in New York on January 23, 1933, a week before Hitler came to power in Berlin. Grosz became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1938, and made his home in Bayside, New York. In the 1930s he taught at the Art Students League, where one of his students was Romare Bearden, who was influenced by his style of collage. Grosz taught at the Art Students League until 1955. His other students included Joseph Glasco and Robert Cenedella, whom he mentored from 1957 to 1959.
In America, Grosz determined to make a clean break with his past, and changed his style and subject matter. He continued to exhibit regularly, and in 1946 he published his autobiography, Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein, first translated as A Little Yes and a Big No. From 1947 to 1959, George Grosz lived in Huntington, New York, where he taught painting at the Huntington Township Art League. It is said by Huntington locals that he used what was to become his most famous painting, Eclipse of the Sun, to pay for a car repair bill, in his relative penury. The painting was later acquired by house painter Tom Constantine to settle a debt of $104.00.
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 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician in 1950. In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
On May 26, 1920, Grosz married Eva Louise Peter, with whom he had two sons, Peter Michael Grosz (1926–2006), a historian of early German aviation, and Marty Grosz (born 1930), a jazz guitarist.