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George Grosz

George Grosz (1893-1959), was a German expressionist painter, draftsman, and graphic artist. By 1914, Grosz worked in a style influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration, graffiti, and children's drawing. Grosz is best known for his satirical caricatures of Germans and German social classes after World War I and in the Weimar Republic, but he also worked with painting and photomontages. He helped introduce Dadaism to Berlin and formed the art movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit. With relentless and terrifying pressure, Grosz told in his pictures about the profiteers who made fortunes from the war and about the brutal poverty and sinful life, the political chaos and the complacency of the bourgeoisie that followed in the wake of defeat.  His drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, frequently included images 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 for which he is best known adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature in the style of Jugend. His oeuvre includes a few absurdist works, such as Remember Uncle August the Unhappy Inventor which has buttons sewn on it, and also includes a number of erotic artworks. Shortly before Hitler came to power in 1933, Grosz had to flee and emigrate to the United States. After his emigration, 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 watercolors.  His late works never achieved the critical success of his Berlin years.

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