George GROSZ (1893-1958)

George Grosz was born in 1893 in Berlin. He was expelled from school before completing his compulsory education because he hit a teacher. This situation made it difficult for him to pursue a “serious” career. He decided to become an artist, specifically a genre painter, an aspiration that he then abandoned in favor of illustration and caricature.

Grosz studied at the Academy of Dresden and the School of Arts of Berlin, where he found that art was regarded as a tool to communicate the great classical ideals. Like Baudelaire, he moved away from this view believing that the artist had to forge a relation with his own time, and not to a distant past.

The city of Berlin increased his attraction to the modern metropolis and also to common and marginal forms of life. Particularly, his fascination focused on the marginal aspects of crime, murderer, suicide and rape. Grosz absorbed eccentric behavior into his work, not because these situations represented social anomalies, but because he believed they were present in all of us.

He then started publishing illustrations and caricatures in German newspapers such as Ulk and Lustige Blatter that focused on erotic themes, crimes and orgies. These were works that incorporated ideas from Futurism, such as movement, but they displayed other concerns too, in their formal composition, for example.

Although he was a strong opponent of German politics, he volunteered to fight in the First World War to escape the consequences of obligatory conscription. He suffered a sever sinus attack that removed him from combat, but he was conscripted a short time later. The situation became unbearable and in 1917 he attempted suicide. Considered a serious war crime he was condemned to death, but was saved by a patron, the Count of Kessler.

After these events his art gained a new dimension. He filled his work with his own hatred, protesting against German war propaganda, and transformed himself, according to his own words, into a “propagandist of social revolt”. Grosz incorporated the fight against war in his work by becoming an explicitly political artist. He attacked and denounced the ruling classes responsible for and exploiting the war, with a discourse tempered by sarcasm and irony.

Grosz was one of the founders of the Berlin Dada group together with John Heartfield, Otto Dix, Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters. It was within the Dada experiments that he invented Photomontage with Heartfield.

In both his drawings and oil paintings Grosz constructed an aesthetic discourse that attacked the bourgeoisie and the ruling class. Several times he was charged with blasphemy and offending public morals. However, these scandals helped to develop and consolidate his career, not just on a national but also on an international level.

The compositions at this time developed, with the use of Futurist and Cubist techniques, the practice of synthesizing contradictory aspects of society in the same image. Grosz was also inspired by German Expressionist use of strong colours and distorted perspectives, as well as by Constructivism and its structural organisation of space.

The criticism of social corruption in Germany made by Grosz was based on a negative and chaotic attitude towards the contemporary world. The dissolution of perspective that he practiced was a strategy to translate the chaos and degradation of the world.

At the end of the 1920s he began making strong attacks on Hitler and the Nazi party. It was also at this time that he collaborated on the magazine Der Querchnitt, in which Mário Eloy also took part. Both artists were part of the New Objectivity group.
Grosz became unwelcome in Germany and left his country in 1932, with an invitation to lecture in the Arts Student League in New York.

In the United States of America his work changed radically. Due to the change in context, an attack on the social classes no longer made any sense, and his ruthless and raw aesthetics dissolved, producing works that the critics have found little merit in. His last pieces were collages that exhibited the influence of Dada and Pop Art. His presence in the United States was most strongly marked by his teaching.

He returned to Germany in 1958, stating that his American dream had transformed itself into a soap bubble. He died, one month after his arrival in an accident on the staircase of his house.

FILIPA OLIVEIRA