(German, July 26, 1893 - July 6, 1959 )

George Grosz was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group. He was born Georg Groß but changed his name because he did not want a German name.

 In 1916 the artist in protest against nationalism and patriotism changed his name Georg Grosz into George Grosz which appears more American. Following the revolution in Russia, an artists' association, the "November Group" was established in Berlin in 1918, and Grosz joined it, soon after becoming a member of the Communist Party.

From 1918 to 1932, he lived in Berlin, where he was one of the founders of the Dada movement and played the American dandy in the way he dressed and behaved. As early as 1916 he wrote in a letter that the idea of emigrating was beginning to work on him.

His drawings, many of them ink and water color, have contributed greatly to the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. What his sketches of that period depicted are corruption, a sexual debauchery and the unhealthy opulence of certain rich men. These drawings published in several newspapers regularly aroused scandals and were both a political and a social satire.

He was bitterly anti-Nazi, left Germany in 1932, was invited to teach at the Art Students' League in New York on 1933 and he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1938. He taught at the Art Students League until 1936. He also had a private art school, where his students were mainly society ladies. From 1937 to 1939 he won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation which enabled him to devote time to his own work. He was not rich, but he got by comfortably. Under the Nazi regime Grosz lost his German citizenship and numerous of his works were burnt by the Nazis government decision.

In 1954 Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1958 to the Academy of Fine Arts of Germany. His last works in America were collages, which partly recall his Dada period and partly were influenced by Pop Art.

During all his life time, George Grosz drew nudes. This noble subject preoccupied him again and again particularly from the mid-twenties, and then again during his American exile. As we can feel in this Liegender weiblicher akt translated as Reclining Nude Grosz do not search to invest the nude with an absolute beauty. What interested him was to transform the nude figure into a pictorial form. Without any desire of depicting reality in realist verve, this Reclining Nude is an expressionist assemblage of lines which lead us to the recognition of form and dimension and inner meaning. […] Lines may lead to something quite definite and precise – a landscape or a human face or figure. Or it may lead to the subconscious – the land of Fantasy. Fantasy may be uninhibited fancy, which has no contact with the world of reality. [1]

Grosz’s pencil is fluid and draws something quite definite. The absent look of the woman gives all its meaning to this work and lead us directly to her subconscious. She is not there. She is dreaming. This suggested travel into her deeper thoughts enlarges the dimension of this drawing and offers to the composition an inner meaning. […] The searcher of Fantasy should not avoid reality; he should know how to present the outer appearance of things together with the inner content.”

The expressionist treatment and the forms deformation render through this iconic image certain hardness and rigidity which reigned in Germany society in the 1920’s.