Biography
Born in Berlin in 1893 to a family of Lutheran publicans, George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß and spent most of his childhood in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1909 to 1911, and then at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik. However, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 delayed his ambitions to be an artist and illustrator. He served in the army in 1914 and 1917, but he was discharged both times for medical reasons. Back in Berlin he published artwork in Franz Pfemfert’s leftist journal, Die Aktion, and soon became a prominent member of the anti-establishment Dada movement. His evident distaste for German militarism was confirmed by his decision to Americanize his name to George Grosz in 1916. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party of Germany, but left in 1922, disgusted with dictatorial authority after meeting Lenin and Trotsky. In this period he produced his corrosive, politically charged caricatures of life in the Weimar Republic, featuring corpulent businessmen, prostitutes and orgies. Grosz’s artworks quickly attracted the notice of the authorities, and in 1921 he was charged with defaming the German army. He would be charged twice more prior to his departure in the early 1930s for the United States, where he settled to live in New York and secured a teaching post at the Art Students League. Meanwhile in Germany, during the Third Reich, hundreds of his paintings and drawings were confiscated and many destroyed. Eventually he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954, but resolved to return to Berlin, where he died in 1959 after a drunken fall down a flight of stairs.
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