RARE \"German Artist\" George Grosz Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA for Sale

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RARE \"German Artist\" George Grosz Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA For Sale

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RARE \"German Artist\" George Grosz Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA:
$699.99

Up for sale a RARE! "German Artist" George Grosz Hand Signed 3X5 Card.

Ehrenfried Groß; July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known

especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings

of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of

the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic. He immigrated to the United States in 1933,

and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject

matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at

the Art Students League of New

York. In 1959 he returned to Berlin where he died. Grosz was born

Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, the third child of a pub owner. His

parents were devoutly Lutheran. Grosz grew up in the Pomeranian town of Stolp (now Słupsk, Poland). After his father's death in 1900, he

moved to the Wedding district of

Berlin with his mother and sisters. At the urging of his cousin, the young

Grosz began attending a weekly drawing class taught by a local painter named

Grot. Grosz developed his skills further by drawing meticulous copies of

the drinking scenes of Eduard von Grützner, and

by drawing imaginary battle scenes. He was expelled from school in 1908 for

insubordination. From 1909 to 1911, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine

Arts, where his teachers were Richard

Müller, Robert Sterl, Raphael

Wehle, and Osmar Schindler. His

first published drawing was in the satirical magazine Ulk in

1910. From 1912 until 1917 he studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik. He began painting in oils in 1912. In November 1914 Grosz volunteered for military service, in

the hope that by thus preempting conscription he would avoid being sent to the

front. He was given a discharge after hospitalization for sinusitis in 1915. In 1916 he changed the spelling of his

name to "de-Germanise" and internationalise his name – thus Georg

became "George" (an English spelling), while in his surname he replaced

the German "ß" with its phonetic equivalent "sz". He did this as a protest against German

nationalism and out of a romantic enthusiasm for America – a legacy of his early reading of the books

of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karl May – that he retained for the rest of his life. His

artist friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld likewise changed his name

to John Heartfield at the same time.

In January 1917 Grosz was drafted for service, but in May he was discharged as

permanently unfit. In the last months of 1918, Grosz joined the Spartacist League, which was renamed the Communist Party of Germany (KPD)

in December 1918. He was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in

January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents. In 1920 he

married Eva Peters. In the same year he published a collection of his drawings,

titled Gott mit uns ("God

with us"), a satire on German society. Grosz was accused of insulting

the army, which resulted in a 300 German Mark fine and the confiscation of the plates used

to print the album. In 1928 he was prosecuted for blasphemy after

publishing anticlerical drawings, such as one depicting prisoners under assault

from a minister who vomits grenades and weapons onto them, and another showing

Christ coerced into military service. According to historian David Nash, Grosz

"publicly stated that he was neither Christian nor pacifist, but was

actively motivated by an inner need to create these pictures", and was

finally acquitted after two appeals. By contrast, in 1942 Time magazine identified Grosz as a pacifist. vIn

1922 Grosz traveled to Russia with the writer Martin Andersen Nexø. Upon

their arrival in Murmansk they were briefly arrested

as spies; after their credentials were approved, they were allowed to meet

with Grigory Zinoviev, Anatoly Lunacharsky,

and Vladimir Lenin. Grosz's

six-month stay in the Soviet Union left him unimpressed by what he had seen. He

ended his membership in the KPD in 1923, although his political positions were

little changed. According to Grosz's son Martin Grosz, during the 1920s Nazi officers visited Grosz's

studio looking for him, but because he was wearing a working man's apron Grosz

was able to pass himself off as a handyman and avoid being taken into custody. His

work was also part of the painting

event in the art

competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics. Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany shortly before Hitler

came to power. In June 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach the summer

semester at the Art Students League of New York. In October 1932, Grosz returned to Germany,

but on January 12, 1933, he and his family emigrated to the United States. Grosz became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1938, and made his home in Bayside, New York. In the 1930s he taught at the Art Students League, where one of his students was Romare Bearden, who was influenced by his style of collage. He taught at the Art Students League intermittently until

1955. In America, Grosz

determined to make a clean break with his past, and changed his style and

subject matter. He continued to exhibit regularly, and in 1946

he published his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No.

In the 1950s he opened a private art school at his home and also worked as

Artist in Residence at the Des Moines Art Center.

Grosz was elected into the National Academy of Design as

an Associate Academician in 1950. In 1954 he was elected to the American

Academy of Arts and Letters. Though he had U.S. citizenship, he

resolved to return to Berlin, and relocated there in May 1959. He died there on July 6, 1959, from the

effects of falling down a flight of stairs after a night of drinking.