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George Grosz political activist, satirist who was accused even before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis of being unpatriotic,
anti-German and as being decadent and beyond redemption - the Nazis later also condemned , banned and publicly burned his
works in order to cleanse Germany of such decadence and unGerman thoughts, feelings and sentiments.
The Americans though on the other hand were unable to appreciate Grosz's scathing yet prophetic attacks on fascism and Nazism
seeing his response as a bit extreme. Little did they know how correct he and other critics of Fascism and Nazism really were.
And as we know most Americans, Canadians and Brits prefer their art to be pretty and empty of all profound meaning or sense
of real humanity. We are in the age of Dr. Pangloss and that this is the best of all possible worlds so why bitch and moan
and gripe just sit back and become comfortably numb as Pink Floyd would say so there you go...
"Everywhere, hymns of hatred were struck up. Everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the
army, the property owners, the workers, the unemployed, the black Reichwehr, the control commissions, the politicians, the
department stores, and the Jews again. It was an orgy of incitement, and the republic itself was a weak thing, scarcely perceptible.
… It was a completely negative world, topped with colorful froth that many imagined to be true, happy Germany before
the onset of the new barbarism." George Grosz
After moving to America in 1933 Grosz whole attitude appeared to change as he adapted to his new environment while trying
to make a living so he created works with less vigor or passion to appease the American academics and its bourgeois apolitical
artistic community.
"My motto was now to give offence to none and be pleasing to all. Assimilation is straightforward once one overcomes the greatly
overvalued superstition concerning character. To have character generally means that one is distinctly inflexible, not necessarily
for reasons of age. Anyone who plans to get ahead and make money would do well to have no character at all. The second rule
for fitting in is to think everything beautiful! Everything – that is to say, including things that are not beautiful
in reality." George Grosz
Note: The George Grosz drawings below which are From Graphic Witness? George Grosz Abrechnung Folgt! 57 Politische Zeichnungen
Translated as "One Day We'll Get Even" or, "The Day of Reckoning," this collection of 57 political drawings was published
in 1923 by Der Malik, in Berlin.
Part of a series titled "Kleine revolutionare Bibliothek," the series comprised a dozen titles, including other works by Grosz:
Das Gesicht der Herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class); Ecco Homo, Gott Mit Uns, Im Schatten (In the Shadow) and
Die Räuber.
George Grosz (German, 1893-1958): Ecce Homo
"Whoever can, swims, and whoever is weak, goes under" FAMILY IS THE FOUNDATION OF THE NATION: GEORGE GROSZ
MY PENSION : GEORGE GROSZ ( Heroic Wounded War Veteran Left To Beg )
 CAUTION:
DON'T STUMBLE: GEORGE GROSZ
 HITLER IN HELL: GEORGE
GROSZ
"Those who eat well
 ...forget easily"
My Fatherland, May You Rest In Peace (quiet )
I. The Director --
[Die Räuber, 1922] " I will exterminate everything
around me that restricts me from being master"
-- and his puppets
2. "They thunder sweetness and light from their clouds and offer human sacrifice to the god of love"
-- from Schiller, act II scene iii
 Note: The Master will use religion as a tool to get what he desires much like the attitude of the Neoconservatives who also
use religion and Patriotism for their own agenda. But the people are too stupid too know any better.
From Spaightwood Galleries we get this illuminating characterization of the artist's motives which were at odds with the somewhat insane and perverse
society in which he found himself.
Grosz was fascinated by amusement parks and the circus, and he particularly loved clowns. He saw them as playing the same
tragicomic role that the artist was forced to act on a bourgeois society. Grosz used his art of the early Berlin years to
attack the self-contentedness of the bourgeois, primarily its plutocrats, during the German Empire. He anticipated the far
in advance the disillusionment and shock of World War I as well as the change in art and society brought by the chaos of 1918.
. . . Grosz’s paintings depicted modern city life with its desire, passions, and crimes. For Grosz, the chaos of the
big city reflected the amorality of man. His basic attitude was totally pessimistic. By disregarding the laws of perspective,
Grosz’s paintings represented a world falling into pieces. The sexual explicitness in his drawings matched the perverted
knowledge of a precocious youth. Despite his distaste for anything romantic, one cannot fail to notice rather poetic moons
and stars shining above city streets
In 1918 Grosz returned to Berlin even more convinced of society's insanity. At that time he made violently anti-war drawings,
and drawings and paintings attacking the social corruption of Germany, including capitalists, prostitutes, the Prussian military
caste and the middle class.
...He not only depicted victims of the catastrophe of the W.W.I—the disabled, crippled, and mutilated—he also
portrayed the collapse of the capitalist society and its values. His wartime line drawings show him to be a master of caricature.
Here is a short bio. From Olga's Gallery George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Gross was born on 26 July 1893 in Berlin into the family of Karl Ehrenfried Gross, an innkeeper, and his
wife Marie Wilhelmine Luise.. In 1908 he was expelled from school for having returned a trainee teacher's blow.
After passing the entrance exam he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden. While in the Academy he specialized
in graphic art and started to co-operate with satirical magazines as early as 1910. In 1912 Grosz (then Gross) joined the
graphic art course at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1913 he spent several months in Paris at Colarossi's studio.
The main subjects of his drawings of the period are crimes and orgies, erotic subjects; his cartoons find publication in "Ulk",
"Lustige Blätter" and other periodicals. He also did his first book illustrations and began painting in oils.
With the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered, but was discharged from the army several months later following a
surgical operation. During this period in Berlin Gross met various authors, artists and intellectuals, among them those with
whom he would found the Berlin Dada in 1917.
In 1916 the artist in protest against nationalism and patriotism altered his name to George Grosz. The same year he painted
the earliest of his oils known, among them Lovesick and Suicide and a year later he published his first two albums, the "Erste
George Grosz Mappe" and "Kleine Grosz Mappe".
Following the revolution in Russia, an artists' association, the "November Group" was established in Berlin in 1918, and Grosz
joined it, soon after becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1919, with the publisher Wieland Herzfelde (of Malik Publishing
House), he started a magazine called "Die Pleite", and collaborated with Franz Jung on "Jedermann sein eigener Fussball" (Everybody
his own football) and with John Hoexter and Carl Einstein on "Der blutige Ernst" (The bloody seriousness). His drawings, tartly
critical of bourgeois society, appeared in various Malik publications; the artist also produced portfolios and books, which
regularly aroused scandals.
In 1921 his album "Gott mit uns" (God with us) brought Grosz charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army); in 1924 he was prosecuted
for offences against public morality by his album "Ecce Homo" (the album was confiscated as being pornographic); in 1928 for
his drawing "Shut up and keep serving the cause" he was accused of blasphemy. All these scandals only helped consolidate his
fame.
In 1924 the artist became chairman of the artists' association "Rote Gruppe" (Red Group); until 1927 he was a regular contributor
to Communist publications. In 1928 he was co-founder of the "Association Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands" (German
Association of Revolutionary Artists).
And from the Artchive George Grosz (1893-1959)
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"Grosz considered himself a propagandist of the social revolution. He not only depicted victims of the catastrophe of the
First World War - the disabled, crippled, and mutilated - he also portrayed the collapse of capitalist society and its values.
His wartime line drawings show him to be a master of caricature. In a 1925 portfolio of prints Grosz ridiculed Hitler by dressing
him in a bearskin, a swastika tattooed on his left arm. Until 1927 he also painted large allegorical paintings that focused
on the plight of Germany; Count Harry Kessler, a leading intellectual and collector, called these 'modern history pictures.'
"Grosz was called by some the 'bright-red art executioner,' and indeed his political radicalism was well known. He had joined
the German Communist party in 1922. Although a trip to Russia later that year disillusioned him, he continued to work with
[radical publisher] Malik Verlag. Feeling out of step with Russia's politics, Grosz resigned from the party in 1923, but the
next year he became a leader of Berlin's Rote Gruppe (Red group), an organization of revolutionary Communist artists that
prefigured the Assoziation revolutionarer bildender Kunstler Deutschlands (ASSO, Association of revolutionary visual artists
of Germany).
"By 1929 the political climate in Germany had shifted to the right, and, at best, Grosz's work was considered anachronistic.
The periodical Kunst und Kunstler (Art and artists) commented...: 'Dix's Barrikade (Barricade) and Grosz's Wintermarchen (Winter
tale) are now curiosities that only have a place in a wax museum, commemorating the revolutionary time. One doesn't make art
with conviction alone.' In a somewhat more positive light, Grosz was described as a historical figure in the periodical Eulenspiegel
in 1931: 'No other German artist so consciously used art as a weapon in the fight of the German workers during 1919 to 1923
as did George Grosz. He is one of the first artists in Germany who consciously placed art in the service of society. His drawings...are
worthwhile not only in the present but also are documents of proletarian revolutionary art.' These comments were more indicative
of the magazine's editorial stance than the tenor of the times, however. More in keeping with popular sentiment, Deutsche
Kunst und Dekoration (German art and decoration) described Grosz as one-sided and pathological, 'too obstinate, too fanatical,
too hostile to be a descendant of Daumier .' Although according to the magazine's art writer he was a master of form, his
social point of view was wrongly chosen.
"Grosz's reputation as a political activist and deflator of German greatness was no secret. Menacing portents and premonitions
of disaster began to haunt him. A studio assistant appeared in a brown shirt one day and warned him to be careful; a threatening
note calling him a Jew was found beside his easel. A nightmare he recounted in his autobiography ended with a friend shouting
at him 'Why don't you go to America?' When in the spring of 1932 a cable arrived from the Art Students League in New York,
inviting him to teach there during the summer, he accepted immediately. After a short return to Germany, where he was advised
that his apartment and studio had been searched by the Gestapo, who were looking for him, the artist emigrated in January
1933. He became an American citizen in 1938.
"In the meantime Grosz was among the defamed artists whose works had been included in two Schandausstellungen (abomination
exhibitions) in Mannheim and Stuttgart in 1933 In a letter of July 21, 1933, Grosz wrote that he was secretly pleased and
proud about this turn of events, because his inclusion in these exhibitions substantiated the fact that his art had a purpose,
that it was true 9 The polemical articles about modern art, "art on the edge of insanity" as the official Nazi newspaper,
the Volkischer Beobachter called it, also regularly included Grosz, with particular attention paid to his portraiture. A portrait
of Max Hermann-Neisse, later to appear in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, was singled out for the "degenerate loathsomeness
of the subject." A total of 285 of Grosz's works were collected from German institutions; five paintings, two watercolors,
and thirteen graphic works were included in Entartete Kunst.
"Grosz participated in an anti-Axis demonstration in New York in 1940 and revealed his reaction to the Führer in an interview
with Rundfunk Radio in 1958:
"When Hitler came, the feeling came over me like that of a boxer; I felt as if I had lost. All our efforts were for nothing."
"Grosz returned to Germany permanently in 1958, somewhat disillusioned with his American interlude. He had wanted a new beginning
and had tried to deny his political and artistic past, but he was appreciated in America primarily as a satirist, and the
work from the period after the First World War was perceived as his best. The biting commentary that marked this early work
was that of a misanthropic pessimist, not what he had become: an optimist infatuated with the United States. Grosz was unable
to understand the American psyche to the degree that he had the German, and he returned to his homeland in an attempt to regain
the momentum he had lost. He died in Berlin in an accident six weeks after his return."
- From Stephanie Barron, "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany"
Art Links:
Olga's Gallery George Grosz
Olga's Gallery Homepage
Virtual Museum Of Art
ARTCYCLOPEDIA
Robin Urton Eyecon Art
Graphic Witness Visual Arts and Social Commentary
Spaightwood Galleries, INC.
WebMuseum,Paris
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