George Grosz in Berlin

George Grosz arrived in Berlin in 1912, after attending art school in Dresden, and the city he discovered would provide both the raucous subject matter and the acerbic tone for his work over the next two decades. Grosz later remembered the "marvelous theaters in Berlin, a gigantic circus, cabarets and night clubs; beer halls the size of railroad terminals, wine palaces four stories high, six-day races, futurist exhibitions, international tango competitions, and a cycle of Strindberg plays in a special theater." In this cultural ferment, Grosz quickly established himself as an illustrator and satirist, publishing drawings in oppositional periodicals. 

Later in life, Grosz offered a (typically) dissembling account of his origins as a satirist: "Some students are watching...You might make a slip of the pencil, somesing [sic] not just right—extreme, you know—and they say, 'Gee, George, that's fine!' You have the ability, and the time and everything are right for it, and you grow into a role." Grosz captures this anecdote not only his equivocal relationship to his own artistic identity but also the dependence of caricature on exaggeration, on that something extreme produced by a slip of the pencil. The time, Grosz notes, was "right for it," and so was the place. From the upheavals of the First World War to the eventual collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich, Germany experienced a radical social, political, and economic transformation. It was the crucible in which Grosz's nascent talents as a satirist would be forged. 

Grosz's career in Berlin lasted just two decades, during which he experimented with styles as diverse as futurism, dadaist montage, and verism, or New Objectivity. Grosz later characterized dada as "the organized use of insanity to express contempt for a bankrupt world," and in the hands of Grosz and his circle in Berlin, its absurdities became aggressively political. Though Grosz's paintings attacking the figureheads of establishment culture in Weimar-era Germany are among his best-known works today, he was most famous (and feared) at the time for his graphic work, which reached a broader audience.

Heather MacDonald, Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2012), 14-16.

UMO: 13310104  Reflections on George Grosz, Gallery talk with Marty Grosz, George Grosz's son

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