My Drawings expressed my despair,
hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists
cursing at the moon. ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood
from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty
streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be
seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a
third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers
without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical
soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse
blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military
duty. I also wrote poetry. — George Grosz
George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his
caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a
prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar
Republic. He immigrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized
citizen in 1938.
Abandoning the style and subject
matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at
the Art Students League of New Although Grosz made his first oil paintings
in 1912 while still a student, his earliest oils that can be identified today
date from 1916.
By 1914, Grosz worked in a style
influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration,
graffiti, and children's drawings.
Sharply outlined forms are often treated as if
transparent. The City (1916–17) was the first of his many paintings of the
modern urban scene.
He settled in Berlin in 1918 and
was a founder of the Berlin Dada movement, using his satirical drawings to
attack bourgeois supporters of the Weimar Republic. 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.
After his emigration to the USA
in 1933, a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s,
Grosz's work assumed a more sentimental tone in America, a change generally
seen as a decline. His late work never achieved the critical success of his
Berlin years. In 1959 he returned to Berlin where he died.
From 1947 to 1959, George Grosz
lived in Huntington, New York, where he taught painting at the Huntington
Township Art League. It is said by locals that he used what was to become his
most famous painting, Eclipse of the Sun, to pay for a car repair bill, in his
relative penury. The painting was later acquired by house painter Tom
Constantine to settle a debt of $104.00. The Heckscher Museum of Art in
Huntington purchased the painting in 1968 for $15,000.00, raising the money by
public subscription.
In 2006, the Heckscher proposed
selling Eclipse of the Sun at its then-current appraisal of approximately
$19,000,000.00 to pay for repairs and renovations to the building. There was
such public outcry that the museum decided not to sell and announced plans to
create a dedicated space for display of the painting in the renovated museum.
The Grosz estate filed a lawsuit
in 1995 against the Manhattan art dealer Serge Sabarsky, arguing that Sabarsky
had deprived the estate of appropriate compensation for the sale of hundreds of
Grosz works he had acquired. In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in
Manhattan, the Grosz estate claims that Sabarsky secretly acquired 440 Grosz
works for himself, primarily drawings and watercolors produced in Germany in
the 1910s and 20s. The lawsuit was settled in summer in 2006.
In 2003 the Grosz family
initiated a legal battle against the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
asking that three paintings be returned. According to documents, the paintings
were sold to the Nazis after Grosz fled the country in 1933. The museum never
settled the claim, arguing that a three-year statute of limitations in bringing
such a claim had expired. It is well documented that the Nazis stole thousands
of paintings during World War II and many heirs of German painters continue to
fight powerful museums to reclaim such works.
Grosz's younger son is jazz guitarist Marty Grosz