George Grosz

George Grosz
Painter, Draughtsman and Illustrator
1893-1959

German painter, draughtsman and illustrator. He is particularly valued for his caustic caricatures, in which he used the reed pen with notable success. Although his paintings are not quite as significant as his graphic art, a number of them are, nonetheless, major works. He grew up in the provincial town of Stolp, Pomerania (now Słupsk, Poland), where he attended the Oberrealschule, until he was expelled for disobedience. From 1909 to 1911 he attended the Akademie der Künste in Dresden, where he met Kurt Günther, Bernhard Kretschmar (1889–1972) and Franz Lenk (b 1898). Under his teacher Richard Müller (1874–1954), Grosz painted and drew from plaster casts. At this time he was unaware of such avant-garde movements as Die Brücke, also active in Dresden. In 1912 he studied with Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. A year later he moved to the Académie Colarossi in Paris, where he learnt a free drawing style that swiftly reached the essence of a motif.

Before World War I, Grosz was completely apolitical. As a young man he sought refuge from the reality of his lower-middle-class circumstances in the fictitious world of cheap novelettes. He formed a predilection for modern adventures, assassinations, catastrophes, man-hunts and executions. In his early drawings Grosz rendered these subjects with a mixture of contradictory styles, which became a characteristic of his work. He was particularly influenced by the caricatures in satirical Jugendstil periodicals, copying their schematic, expressive gestures and hectic movements. Grosz was also impressed by the sublime gestures of historical academic painting, which he combined with exactly rendered elements from his immediate surroundings. His realism was also exemplified by his sensational reproductions of horrifying scenes.

In 1914 Grosz, like many of his generation, volunteered for service in World War I. Six months later he was back in Germany. Although he was called up again in 1917, he was finally discharged as unfit for service after an episode involving violence and a short compulsory spell in a mental hospital. With the war his artistic approach changed fundamentally, taking its starting-point from his own experience of battlefields, death and destruction. Grosz had learnt to hate war and German militarism, as can be seen in the drawing Fit for Active Service (1916–17; New York, MOMA). Such feelings gave rise to his aversion for Germans, whom he saw as ugly, obese and degenerate: ‘I drew and painted from a spirit of contradiction, and attempted in my work to convince the world that this world is ugly, sick and mendacious’ (Kunstblatt, 1924). The war made Grosz into a misanthropist and a Utopian. In his art he fought against preoccupations of Wilhelmine society by uncovering their shadowy aspects of crime, murder and erotic licence. The sexual murder became a prominent motif, in which the combination of sexuality and violence was presented as a ritualization of the human quest for power, exemplified by political practice. Art became the vehicle of his pessimistic world view, reflecting a ruined world that manifested itself most trenchantly in the big city and its excesses...(Continue Reading)
 

Source: www.moma.org