“My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabalistic bullshit & intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop ... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society”.
George Grosz (1893-1959)
Movement: German Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)
Training: Born in Berlin, raised in Bavaria, art lessons as a young boy
1909-10 Dresden Academy 1912-14 School of Arts & Crafts Berlin
1912 - briefly at Academie Collarosi Paris (makes sev trips to Paris before moving to NY)
Influences: German Expressionism and Futurism, as well as popular illustration, graffiti and children’s drawings. DADA.
Early years: Pre-WWI graphic works, caricature. He was active in the communist party, but more an anarchist than a communist. Shared Baudelaire’s romantic fascination with underground, outsider characters, criminals, soldiers, the proletariat, prostitutes.
Movement: German Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)
Training: Born in Berlin, raised in Bavaria, art lessons as a young boy
1909-10 Dresden Academy 1912-14 School of Arts & Crafts Berlin
1912 - briefly at Academie Collarosi Paris (makes sev trips to Paris before moving to NY)
Influences: German Expressionism and Futurism, as well as popular illustration, graffiti and children’s drawings. DADA.
Early years: Pre-WWI graphic works, caricature. He was active in the communist party, but more an anarchist than a communist. Shared Baudelaire’s romantic fascination with underground, outsider characters, criminals, soldiers, the proletariat, prostitutes.
914 volunteered for military service, discharged in 1915
1916 anglicized the spelling of his name protest German nationalism and enthusiasm for America
1917 drafted for military service, then discharged a few months later as permanently unfit
1918 joins Berlin Dada movement (New Objectivity)
1920 “First International Dada Fair”- he and other organizers were put on trial & fined for “grossly insulting the German army”.
1920s turns to a more realistic style of painting & is recognized intlly as 1 of Germany’s most significant critical artists
1924 Ecce Homo (portfolio of satirical drawings of Berliners) seized by Public Prosecutor, tried for obscenity & fined 6,000 marks.
1928 Background (containing drawing Shut Your Mouth and Keep on Serving depicting Christ on the cross wearing gas mask & soldiers boots) led to charges of blasphemy, case cont til ’33
Key Works:
Fit for Active Service (K.V.) re his bitterness towared the military who whould even deem a skeleton fit for duty.
The City, The Explosion, The Metropolis, all 1917
The City was the first of his paintings of the modern urban scene;
The Funeral, and A Winter’s Tale, 1918
apocalyptic ptgs infl by Futurism - but opposite view of the city: dystopian.
Pillars of Society, 1926.
1933 moves to NYC , 1938 naturalized US citizen, rest career teaching
Later Career: Grosz style generally softens, conventional nudes and landscapes, gen. seen as a decline.
1946 autobiography "A Little Yes and a Big No"
1954 elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters
1958 returns to Berlin, dies few months later after falling down flight of stairs
Interesting: The Nazi’s designated him “Cultural Bolshevist Number One”; over 200 of his drawings exhibited in Degenerate Art exhibition ’37, many confiscated & destroyed.
Legacy: influences other New Objectivity artists; in the US social realists such as Ben Shahn and William Cooper; He was one of the first to use photomontage
Grosz' drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, G did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.
His dadaist work was intended as a protest against this world of mutual destruction. A reaction to what many artist saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide (Kleiner, Fred, 2006 - Gardner’s art through the ages).
1916 anglicized the spelling of his name protest German nationalism and enthusiasm for America
1917 drafted for military service, then discharged a few months later as permanently unfit
1918 joins Berlin Dada movement (New Objectivity)
1920 “First International Dada Fair”- he and other organizers were put on trial & fined for “grossly insulting the German army”.
1920s turns to a more realistic style of painting & is recognized intlly as 1 of Germany’s most significant critical artists
1924 Ecce Homo (portfolio of satirical drawings of Berliners) seized by Public Prosecutor, tried for obscenity & fined 6,000 marks.
1928 Background (containing drawing Shut Your Mouth and Keep on Serving depicting Christ on the cross wearing gas mask & soldiers boots) led to charges of blasphemy, case cont til ’33
Key Works:
Fit for Active Service (K.V.) re his bitterness towared the military who whould even deem a skeleton fit for duty.
The City, The Explosion, The Metropolis, all 1917
The City was the first of his paintings of the modern urban scene;
The Funeral, and A Winter’s Tale, 1918
apocalyptic ptgs infl by Futurism - but opposite view of the city: dystopian.
Pillars of Society, 1926.
1933 moves to NYC , 1938 naturalized US citizen, rest career teaching
Later Career: Grosz style generally softens, conventional nudes and landscapes, gen. seen as a decline.
1946 autobiography "A Little Yes and a Big No"
1954 elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters
1958 returns to Berlin, dies few months later after falling down flight of stairs
Interesting: The Nazi’s designated him “Cultural Bolshevist Number One”; over 200 of his drawings exhibited in Degenerate Art exhibition ’37, many confiscated & destroyed.
Legacy: influences other New Objectivity artists; in the US social realists such as Ben Shahn and William Cooper; He was one of the first to use photomontage
Grosz' drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, G did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.
His dadaist work was intended as a protest against this world of mutual destruction. A reaction to what many artist saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide (Kleiner, Fred, 2006 - Gardner’s art through the ages).
Republican Automatons, 1920.
- caricatures allegorical figural representation of different classes of German society
- automaton, or robot = central Dadaist motif (dada obsession with body as mechanism)
- automatons = hyperbolic version of half-man half-machine state of many veterans returning home with prosthetic limbs
- robotic flag waving and vainglorious war medals
- face with no distinguishing characteristic - just a number 12.
- the other’s head is literally empty and stenciled cheer “123 HURRA” spew from him as if activated by the gear
- patriotic Germans = faceless, mindless machines; the stylized, nondescript cityscape is also a “faceless” industrial setting.
- 1920 introduces this new style (Dada influence), different stylistically from his apocalyptic paintings (technique is more remote, autonomous, cold, distant)
- precise draftsmanship (use of protractor) an unmodulated washes of color reflected the “efficiency of standardization of the industrial age”
- “signature” is a rubber stamp
- Republican Automatons = condemnation of moderate Weimer Republicans
- see Fit for Active Service (K.V.) re his bitterness toward the military who would even deem a skeleton fit for duty. Returned from war in 1918.
Artstory biography
See “Dada in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art,” pp. 187-191. (readable in google books).
Detailed biography of Grosz is in the MOMA German Expressionism section
"Ben Hecht and George Grosz: A Dada Happenstance": Caxtonian pdf
Name: from an exhibition organized by curator Gustav Hartlaub in Mannheim in 1925. Hartlaub's original title for the exhibition was Post-Expressionism.
Key Figures: George Grosz, Otto Dix (1891-1969), Max Beckmann (1884-1950)
Key Works: Otto Dix, The Skat Players, 1920. Max Beckmann, Departure, 1932-35. and Grosz (above) |