A short life of the author
George Grosz (26 July 1893 – 6 July 1959), born Georg Ehrenfried Groß, was a German-American artist whose drawings, paintings, and published portfolios constitute one of the most ferocious bodies of political art produced in the twentieth century. His work from the Weimar Republic period (1919–1933) — savage, precise, obscene, and brilliantly draughted — depicts a society in decomposition: war profiteers gorging themselves, bloated generals, murdered prostitutes, crippled veterans begging in the streets, and a bourgeoisie whose moral emptiness Grosz rendered with an anatomist’s eye and a satirist’s rage. His published portfolios were prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy; his autobiography, A Small Yes and a Big No (1946), is one of the great artistic memoirs; and his influence on subsequent political art — from Ralph Steadman to Robert Crumb to the graphic novel tradition — is direct and profound.
Life
Grosz was born in Berlin and grew up in the Pomeranian city of Stolp. He studied art at the Dresden Academy and the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule. During World War I, he was drafted into the German army, suffered a nervous breakdown, was hospitalised, and emerged from the war with a hatred of militarism and nationalism that fuelled the rest of his career.
In the immediate postwar years, he became a leading figure of the Berlin Dada movement — alongside John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch — and then of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, which rejected Expressionist abstraction in favour of a sharp, unsentimental realism. Grosz’s realism was anything but neutral: it was a weapon, and the targets were the people he held responsible for the war, the inflation, the poverty, and the moral catastrophe of postwar Germany.
He joined the Communist Party briefly and was prosecuted three times by the Weimar government for blasphemy and obscenity — his drawings of clergymen, soldiers, and capitalists were considered threats to public morality. The prosecutions made him famous.
In 1933, sensing the direction of German politics, Grosz emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York in January — the same month Hitler became Chancellor. He taught at the Art Students League and became an American citizen in 1938. His American work was softer, more lyrical, and less politically engaged than his German work — a change that some critics saw as a loss of power and others as a genuine artistic evolution. He returned to Berlin in 1959 and died there within weeks of his arrival.
Published Portfolios
Grosz’s published portfolios — collections of drawings and lithographs — are his most accessible and most powerful works. The Face of the Ruling Class (Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse, 1921) and Ecce Homo (1923) are the masterpieces: collections of drawings that depict Weimar Berlin as a landscape of corruption, violence, and grotesque excess.
Ecce Homo — the title references Pontius Pilate’s presentation of Christ to the crowd — contains eighty-four watercolours and sixteen drawings of extraordinary technical virtuosity and moral ferocity. The images include sex murders, brothel scenes, obese industrialists, and emaciated workers. The portfolio was confiscated by police and Grosz was prosecuted for obscenity. He was convicted and fined. The confiscated plates were destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
A Small Yes and a Big No (1946)
Grosz’s autobiography — written in English, his adopted language — covers his childhood, his training, the war, the Dada years, the Weimar period, and his emigration to America. The writing is vivid, sardonic, and self-aware: Grosz describes his own transformation from idealistic young artist to furious satirist with a clarity that few autobiographies achieve. The book is also a portrait of Berlin in its most extreme period — a city of simultaneous brilliance and depravity that Grosz knew as intimately as anyone alive.
Critical Standing
Grosz is one of the great political artists of the twentieth century — the visual equivalent of Bertolt Brecht, with whom he collaborated. His Weimar-era work is universally admired; his American work is more contested. His influence on graphic satire, on the underground comics movement, and on the visual culture of political protest is enormous.
Collecting Grosz
Original Grosz drawings bring $10,000–$100,000 at auction. Published portfolios — Ecce Homo (1923, various editions) — bring $1,000–$5,000 depending on edition and condition. A Small Yes and a Big No (1946, Dial Press) in first edition brings $50–$150. Monographs and exhibition catalogues are modestly priced. Grosz’s prints and lithographs, available in editions, bring $500–$5,000.