Including 150 work on paper as well as several of the artist's key theoretical essays and letters, this text is the catalogue for a 1997 Royal Academy exhibition of the drawings, watercolours and prints of George Grosz.

This overdue investigation of George Grosz’s (1893–1959) most compelling paintings, drawings, prints, and collages offers a reassessment of the celebrated German Expressionist during his years in Berlin—from his earliest artistic endeavors to the trenchant satirical images and searing depictions of moral decay between the World Wars for which he is known today. Menacing street scenes, rowdy cabarets, corrupt politicians, wounded soldiers, greedy war profiteers, and other symbols of Berlin’s interwar decline all met with the artist’s relentless gaze, which exposed the core social issues that eventually led to Germany’s extreme nationalist politics. Featuring masterpieces as well as rarely published works, this book provides further insight into the artist’s creative pinnacle, reached during this critical and ominous period in German history.

The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates GroszÕs American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how GroszÕs art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents GroszÕs work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what GermanyÕs postwar future should be. Important too at this time were GroszÕs interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art worldÕs consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of GroszÕs work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.

George Grosz (1893-1959) was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group. He was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, but changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic enthusiasm for America. Anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany in 1932, and in 1933 was invited to teach at the Art Students League of New York, where he would teach intermittently until 1955. Over 500 illustrations, drawings, and paintings in this book document the entire output of the artist's German and American years, including drawings spanning from when the artist was the age of fifteen to his paintings made during his U.S. period. Also included are sketches of stage designs he created between 1919-1954 for theatre pieces by Bernard Shaw, Iwan Goll, Georg Kaiser, Paul Zech, and Jaroslav Kaek, as well as numerous collages. The volume is complete with unpublished photographs from the painter's private life and two essays by Enrico Crispolti and Philippe Dagen.