George Grosz quotes

George Grosz was a German artist, celebrated for his sharply satirical drawings and paintings. His work vividly critiqued the corruption and decadence of German society during the Weimar Republic. He became a prominent figure in the Dada and New Objectivity movements. Here are 22 of his quotes:

Yes, [to] the Communist party! [the presiding judge asked Grosz: 'Do you belong to a political party?'].

George Grosz

Art today is an absolutely secondary matter. Anyone who is able to look further than the walls of his own studio can see this.. .All the same, art is a business that demands a very clear decision from anyone who undertakes it. It is not immaterial where you stand in this business.. .Are you on the side of the exploiters or on that of the masses, who want to wring the exploiters' necks?

George Grosz

The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.

George Grosz

I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.

George Grosz

I stood up as best I could to their disgusting stupidity and brutality, but I did not, of course, manage to beat them at their own game. It was a fight to the bitter end, one in which I was not defending ideals or beliefs but simply my own self.

George Grosz

I am lonely without measure; that is to say, I am alone with my doubles, phantasms in whom I realize specific dreams, ideas, inclinations, and so on. I rip three other people out of my inner life, give them names, and believe in them myself. Gradually three clearly defined types have emerged: *1: Grosz. *2: Count Ehrenfried, the nonchalant aristocrat with the well-manicured fingernails, concerned only with cultivating himself; in a word, the detached, aristocratic individualist. *3: The physician. Dr. William King Thomas, the more American, practical counterweight to Grosz the mother figure.

George Grosz

A composition should be simple and clear. That is why the drawings of children and primitives are so strong.

George Grosz

My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.

George Grosz

Day after day gasped away, slowly seep hours when fettered or immured, only at times does imagination scale the palisades that the spirit of chaos and confusion, the spirit of reactionary bombast, has set up around us - dreams, dreams of endless, destructive hate! Mists of hate, beclouding the burning brain!

George Grosz

Árt is dead. Long live Tatlin's new machine art.

George Grosz

I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.

George Grosz

I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.

George Grosz

It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture.

George Grosz

What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

George Grosz

Peace was declared, but not all of us were drunk with joy or stricken blind.

George Grosz

Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great German army had disintegrated.

George Grosz

In 1916 I was discharged from military service, or rather, given a sort of leave of absence on the understanding that I might be recalled within a few months. And so I was a free man, at least for a while.

George Grosz

I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them.

George Grosz

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.

George Grosz