George Grosz
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Milestone works
1917: Explosion
1919: To Oscar Panizza, Blood is the Best Sauce
1921: Gray Day
1922: Dusk
1923: Hitler, The Savior
1926: Eclipse of the Sun, Pillars of Society
1927: Warning [warning against rising Nazi menace and moral decay in Germany]
1929: The Agitator (Hitler)
Analysis
Trewin Copplestone noted that he was a "deeply disillusioned man, he saw humanity as essentially bestial and the city of Berlin as a sink of depravity and deprivation, its streets crowded with unprincipled profiteers, prostitutes, war-crippled dregs and a variety of perverts. A communist, his feeling of social outrage stimulated him to produce the most biting drawings and paintings." and Robert Hughes remarked that "in Grosz's Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art."
Quotes
- "My art was to be a gun & a sword; my drawing pens I declared to be empty straws as long as they did not take part in the fight for freedom."
- "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 cabbalistic bullshit and 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."
Autobiography
See his 1946 autobiography A Little Yes and a Big No which was published in the United States by The Dial Press.