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.

This is a series of short nearly wordless comics, arranged chronologically, that form a biography of the caricaturist best known for his visualization of the Weimar Republic. George Grosz (1893–1959) was a German fine artist, cartoonist, and teacher who drew from pop culture, was active in the Dada and New Objectivist movements, and was an influence for artists like Ben Shahn. (His antiwar painting, Eclipse from the Sun, would inspire Vietnam protesters.) In this graphic biography, written and drawn by Fiske, angular art lays Kandinsky-like lines over scenes set in anything-goes, post–World War I Berlin: connecting, emphasizing, tracing movement. Curves evoke the fleshy sex of Grosz’s work. (Fiske channels the exuberance and fascination with line that typified Grosz’s work, and more generally early to mid-century art movements.) Symbolically, Fiske uses two colors―red for Berlin, a slash of Grosz’s lipstick, a flash of tie―and green for the jazz and trains of New York, where Grosz would flee from Nazi Germany. Fiske’s thoughtful Grosz is a far cry from the plodding pedantry of the graphic hagiographies that earnestly clutter library shelves; it’s a work of art in its own right.

"In his trenchant, inimitable style, George Grosz (1893-1959) skewered the German establishment during the turbulent period between World War I and the Third Reich. Decadence, corruption, greed and violence are the recurring themes in this fascinating selection of 100 drawings and paintings. The text follows Grosz through his extraordinary career and offers an intriguing look at the vanished world of the Berlin avant-garde."--Cover.

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.

From the early Renaissance through Baroque and Romanticism to Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop, these canonical works of Western Art span eight centuries and a vast range of subjects. Here are the sacred and the scandalous, the minimalist and the opulent, the groundbreaking and the conventional. There are paintings that captured the feeling of an era and those that signaled the beginning of a new one. Works of art that were immediately recognised for their genius, and others that were at first met with resistance. All have stood the test of time and in their own ways contribute to the dialectic on what makes a painting great, how notions of art have changed, to what degree art reflects reality, and to what degree it alters it. Brought together, these great works illuminate the changing preoccupations and insights of our ancestors, and give us pause to consider which paintings from our own era will ultimately join the canon.