TitleSelf-Portrait
Artist
George Grosz
(American, 1893 - 1959)
Date1937
MediumOil on canvasboard
DimensionsUnframed: 24 × 19 3/4 in.
Framed: 29 1/2 × 25 5/8 × 2 1/8 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "GROSZ".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, October 5, 1959
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1604-P
Label TextBorn in Germany in 1893, George Grosz is best known as a founder of the Berlin Dada movement, which was a reaction to the horrors of World War I, and for Grosz, a rejection of contemporary life and the values upon which it was based. Grosz had studied at the Royal Saxon Academy of the Fine Arts in Dresden and the Royal Arts and Crafts School in Berlin, but was influenced by Italian Futurist art he had seen around 1913. He soon turned away from the nihilism of Dada to an active, especially virulent attack on the depravity of post-war German society, and then the evil evidence of fascism through his satiric drawings.Grosz left Germany to come to America just before Hitler's rise to power and he became an American citizen in 1938. In America, Grosz's artistic expression was considerably altered and working in oil and watercolor, he turned to more conventional subjects, especially related to his summer stays on Massachusetts's Cape Cod in the 1940s. The artist was elected Associate member of the National Academy in 1950, but it wasn't until just before his death in 1959 that he gave this self-portrait dating from 1937.
Collections
- Artist Portrait Highlights from the Collection
