Art Profile: George Grosz (1893-1959)

Georg Ehrenfried Gross was born on 26 July 1893 in Berlin into the family of Karl Ehrenfried Gross, an innkeeper, and his wife Marie Wilhelmine Luise. When the boy was only seven years old his father died. Together with his mother he lived alternately in Berlin and Stolp in Pomerania, where Georg started secondary school in 1902. In 1908 he was expelled from school for having returned a trainee teacher's blow.

After passing the entrance exam he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden. While in the Academy he specialized in graphic art and started to co-operate with satirical magazines as early as 1910. In 1912 Grosz (then Gross) joined the graphic art course at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1913 he spent several months in Paris at Colarossi's studio. The main subjects of his drawings of the period are crimes and orgies, erotic subjects; his cartoons find publication in "Ulk", "Lustige Blätter" and other periodicals. He also did his first book illustrations and began painting in oils.

With the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered, but was discharged from the army several months later following a surgical operation. During this period in Berlin Gross met various authors, artists and intellectuals, among them those with whom he would found the Berlin Dada in 1917.

Great gallery of pictures featuring his artwork, I especially liked 'Beauty, I Thee Will Praise' and 'People'.

(rest of biography, more art at the link)