George Grosz

Biography

In 1916 Georg Ehrenfried Groß became George Grosz: “Georg” turned into the English “George”, and the German “ß” into “sz”. It was a protest against German nationalism and the anti-English hysteria of the war years, and also an expression of a long-standing fascination with America, which came from the books of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karl May. His friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld changed his name at the same time, becoming John Heartfield.

He was born on 26 July 1893 in Berlin, into the family of a pub owner. His childhood was spent in the Pomeranian town of Stolp (now Słupsk). After his father’s death in 1900 the family returned to Berlin briefly, and then his mother and the children lived in Stolp again. He copied pictures from illustrated magazines, drew imaginary battles and went to drawing lessons with a local painter. He was expelled from school in 1908 for insubordination. In 1909–1911 he studied in Dresden, where he met Otto Dix, and then in Berlin under Emil Orlik. His first drawing was published in the satirical magazine Ulk in 1910. In 1913 he spent eight months in Paris, took classes at the Académie Colarossi and discovered the graphic work of Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec.

In November 1914 Grosz volunteered for the army, hoping in this way to avoid being sent to the front. In 1915 he was discharged because of illness. In January 1917 he was called up again, and in May he was released as unfit for service; by his own account, he was about to be shot as a deserter and was saved by Count Harry Kessler. Confirming this from other documents is hard.

His drawings appeared in 1916 in the magazines Neue Jugend and Die Aktion, and critics wrote about him. In 1917 he finished “Metropolis”, an early painting of the big city: streets splitting apart, people running about aimlessly, everything soaked in blood red. It is now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. He also painted “The City” (1916–17). Together with Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde he was one of the founders of Berlin Dada. In 1920 he helped organise the First International Dada Fair and showed there the picture “A Victim of Society”, later retitled “Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor”.

At the end of 1918 he joined the Spartacist League, soon renamed the Communist Party of Germany. In January 1919 he was arrested during the Spartacist uprising but escaped using false papers. With Herzfelde he published magazines and portfolios of drawings at the Malik-Verlag publishing house: “Gott mit uns” (1920), “Ecce Homo” (1922–23), “Der Spiesser-Spiegel” (1925) and “Hintergrund” (1928). For “Gott mit uns” he was fined 300 marks in 1921 for insulting the Reichswehr, the German army, and the print run was destroyed. For “Ecce Homo” he was convicted of obscenity in 1924, and some of the plates had to be removed. He illustrated Alphonse Daudet’s “Tartarin de Tarascon”, drew for Simplicissimus and designed sets for Erwin Piscator’s theatre, including “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1928.

In 1922 Grosz spent almost half a year in Soviet Russia. In Murmansk he and the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexø were briefly arrested as spies. He saw Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Vladimir Tatlin, and talked with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet commissar for education. What he saw did not impress him, and in 1923 he left the Communist Party. In 1924–25 and again in 1927 he lived in France.

To my mind, two paintings of 1926 explain his German years better than anything else. “Pillars of Society” (Nationalgalerie, Berlin) shows a lawyer, a journalist, a politician and an army chaplain. “Eclipse of the Sun” (Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington) shows Hindenburg at a table with headless ministers, prompted by a capitalist. Between 1927 and 1932 Grosz was taken to court five times over the drawing of Christ in a gas mask from the portfolio “Hintergrund”. In 1929 the Reichsgericht, Germany’s supreme court, acquitted him, and the case ended with an acquittal in 1931.

In June 1932 he accepted an invitation to teach at the Art Students League of New York, and on 12 January 1933 he emigrated to the United States with his family. A few weeks later he was stripped of his German citizenship in Germany, and the Nazis classed his work as “degenerate art”. He received American citizenship in 1938 and lived in Bayside, and from 1947 in Huntington. In America he resolved to break with his past: he painted watercolour landscapes and nudes and drew for Esquire. The portfolio “Interregnum” (1936) sold poorly. Until 1955 he taught at the League, and his students included Romare Bearden and Robert Cenedella. In 1944 he made the series “Cain, or Hitler in Hell”. His autobiography, “A Little Yes and a Big No”, appeared in 1946; in 1950 he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design, and in 1954 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In May 1959 Grosz returned to Berlin. A few weeks later, on 6 July, he was found dead outside his house.