?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
GEORGE GROSZ Brownstone Houses, New York.
Watercolor on paper, circa 1937. 149x229 mm; 5 7/8x9 inches. Signed in brown ink, lower right recto.
Exhibited at the Art Institure of Chicago International Watercolor Exhibition, 1937, with the label on the frame back.
Son of an innkeeper and his wife, George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Gross in Berlin in 1893. His father died when he was only 7, forcing George and his mother to move back and forth between Berlin and Stolp, Pomerania (now Poland). In Stolp Grosz began taking drawing lessons. Soon after he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden, where, around 1910, he became involved in illustrating satirical magazines. Grosz studied for a short time in Paris and, at the outbreak of WWI, enlisted in the German Army as an infantryman. He was discharged after only several months, the result of an injury necessitating surgery and a subsequent nervous breakdown.
Around this time, Grosz began to use biting satire and caustic social criticism to focus on portraying the ruthlessness and obscenity of the ruling class in his artwork. In 1917, along with like-minded artists and writers, he formed the Berlin Dada; a movement dedicated to protesting war and the Capitalism that had permeated the conscious of post-war, Weimar Germany.
Grosz's staunch anti-Nazi reputation brought him to the attention of the German government, which began to persecute him for offenses against morality. His apartment and studio were ransacked by the Gestapo. At this time, coincidentally, a welcome invitation from The Art Students League to come teach in New York landed on Grosz's doorstep and, in 1937, he emigrated to the United States.
Grosz became a citizen of the United States whilst his works were being burned at nationalist rallies in Berlin. At this time, during Grosz's first year or so in New York, he painted Brownstone Houses, New York. Grosz remained in the United States and held various teaching posts, including one at Columbia University. In 1958, Grosz returned to Germany and died six weeks later in Berlin, the casualty of an alcohol related injury.
