George Grosz
American, born Germany, 1893 - 1959Untitled, n.d.
Not on view
Lithograph on paper
Dimensions10 1/2 × 7 1/4 in. (26.7 × 18.4 cm)
Image: 10 1/2 × 7 1/4 in. (26.7 × 18.4 cm)
Gift of Mr. Jack B. Pierson, 1993.21
The painter and caricaturist Grosz was born in Berlin in 1893. He received his academic training at the Royal Saxon Academy of Fine Arts between 1909 and 1911. Grosz developed an early affiliation with the German Expressionist group. While serving in the German infantry (1914-16), he produced a series of violently satiric drawings of the military that gained him considerable notoriety. In 1918 Grosz joined the German Dada movement and over the next fourteen years produced an extensive body of work, chronicling the moral decay of postwar Germany. Grosz was arrested three times during the 1920s following the publication of portfolios like Ecco Homo.
Grosz's position was increasingly threatened by the rise of Nazism, so in 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach at the Art Students League in New York. During the late 1940s, Grosz created a series of "stickmen," including images such as the Untitled piece in the FIA's collection, which is a typical visual elaboration of his cataclysmic vision of postwar ruin, starvation and suffering. The disreputable looking figure with a halo of thorns in a pharmacy is looking for a prescription to ease his pain and block out feelings of isolation and doom.
