George Grosz

July 26 1893

George Grosz was a german artist known especially for his savage caricature drawings of Berlin life in the 1920's. Hw was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada movement and the New objective group durning the weimar Republic before he emigrated to the States.

He was born George Ehrenfried Grob but Changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic adoration for America, which originated from reading books by James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karly May.

In 1920, with Heartfield and Otto Dix, he took part in the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe. Grosz and Heartfield criticized the contemporary art world and the elevation of the artist to quasi-divine status. In a letter of opposition to the ‘Novembergruppe’, Grosz called on artists to ‘collaborate in the building of a new human community, the community of working people’.

Grosz made his contribution towards realizing this goal by engaging with contemporary events through his works. For him Dada was the expression of a specific political stance. He remained politically committed even when he left Dada and turned to a realistic style of painting in the 1920s, in keeping with the spirit of the decade.

His earliest oils that can be identified today date from 1916. By 1914, Grosz worked in a style influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration, graffiti, and children's drawings.Sharply outlined forms are often treated as if transparent.

In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects. His draftsmanship was very good although the works for which he is best known adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature.

After his emigration to the USA in 1933, Grosz "sharply rejected his previous work, and caricature in general.In place of his earlier corrosive vision of the city, he now painted conventional nudes and many landscape water-colours.

Images

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2374

Nie