GROSZ

George Grosz (1893-1959) was one of the most important exponents ofDadaism, and therefore of political painting in general. He not onlycondemned both militarism and bourgeois culture, but also set himself inopposition to traditional forms of art. The decisive element in Grosz'spaintings is their content: in them he pointed out defects in thepolitical and social conditions, literally arraigning them before thepublic. For Grosz, painting served as a political instrument: "I drew andpainted from a sense of contradiction and through my work tried toconvince the world that it was ugly, sick, and phoney." Grosz's paintingsfunction as collages: the pictorial space is fragmented and thus takes ona futuristic aspect. Countless lines shoot through the pictures; thevarious visual planes collide with each other. Fascinated by themetropolis, Grosz depicted the wild and dissolute life in the bars andnightclubs of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. He directed his attentionto the shady side of life and filled his canvas with caricatures ofdistorted figures. Grosz never permitted human beings to emerge asindividuals, but instead always portrayed types, as representatives of asocial level or class. The Nazis castigated his works as "degenerate art".After the publication of his candidly drawn "pornographic illustrations",Grosz fell under strong criticism in the 1920s.