GROSZ, GEORGE

born July 26, 1893, Berlin, Ger. died July 6, 1959, Berlin German artist whose caricatures and paintings provided some of the most vitriolic social criticism of his time. So famous were his depictions of war and depravity that the Nazis called him Cultural Bolshevist Number One. A French critic labeled his work the most definitive catalog of man's depravity in all history. After studying art in Dresden and Berlin, Grosz sold caricatures to magazines and spent a half year in Paris, which influenced his development. When World War I broke out, he volunteered for the infantry, was invalided in 1916, and moved into a garret studio in Berlin. There he sketched prostitutes, disfigured veterans, and other personifications of war's ravages. In 1917 he was recalled to the army as a trainer. Later he was arrested as a deserter and placed in a military asylum. By war's end in 1918 Grosz had developed an unmistakable graphic style that combined a highly expressive use of line with ferocious social caricature. Out of his wartime experiences and his observations of chaotic postwar Germany grew a series of drawings savagely attacking militarism, war profiteering, the gulf between rich and poor, social decadence, and finally Nazism. In such drawing collections as The Face of the Ruling Class (1921) and Ecce Homo (1922), he epitomizes fat Junkers, greedy capitalists, smug bourgeoisie, sottish drinkers, lechers, hypocrites of his timesas well as hollow-faced factory labourers, the poor, and the unemployed. At this time Grosz belonged to the Dada art movement. Gradually, as in his Caf (1925), he became associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, which reflected the resignation and cynicism of post-World War I Germany. After emigrating to the United States in 1932, Grosz drew magazine cartoons, nudes, and landscapes and began teaching at the Art Students League of New York, where his appointment aroused controversy. He became a U.S. citizen in 1938. During World War II he showed his old pessimism in such sharply coloured, teeming canvases as The Survivor (1944). Grosz died in Berlin about three weeks after returning to Germany for a visit.