GEORGE GROSZ

Georg Ehrenfried Groß (July 26, 1893 - July 6, 1959)

German-American painter and illustrator. He grew up in the provincial town of Stolp, Pomerania (now Slupsk, Poland), where he attended the Oberrealschule, until he was expelled for disobedience.
From 1909 to 1911 he attended the Akademie der Kuenste in Dresden. After studies in Berlin, he went on to Paris where he learned a free drawing style that swiftly reached the essence of a motif.

Grosz was the emblematic artist of the Weimar years, and was known at the time as a radical artist (quoting one contemporary critic:) 'No other German artist so consciously used art as a weapon in the fight of the German workers during 1919 to 1923 as did George Grosz. He is one of the first artists in Germany who consciously placed art in the service of society. His drawings are worthwhile not only in the present but also are documents of proletarian revolutionary art.'

In 1932 he was invited to New York, and left just as the Gestapo were moving to search his flat and studio. Grosz became a US citizen in 1938 but never understood the US as he had his native Germany, and his radicalism tapered off with the War. He decided to return to Germany in 1958, and died in an accident in Berlin shortly after his arrival.

Source: http://www.mcleanbooks.com/view_artist.php?person=1403

My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics.

This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... a day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grosz