GEORGE GROSZ (Georg Ehrenfried Groß)
Berlín,(Germany) 1893 - Berlin Occidental (Germany)1959 

He spent his childhood in his native city and in Stolp, in Pomerania, where he received his first drawing classes. In 1909 he began his training as an artist. After graduating at the same time the graduated from de academy in Dresden, in 1912 he joined the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin, and the following year he started drawing classes in Colarossi’s studio during his first visit to Paris. At the same time he became acquainted with the work of the Futurists, the German Expressionist movements and the Cubists.
Although he started working with oil-paint in 1912, his principal activity in those early years focused on drawing and illustration. This was converted by the experience of the war –in which he participated as a volunteer- into a critical instrument of condemnation of its horrors. In 1916 he became more closely connected with Expressionist circles and began a prolific collaboration with Wieland Herzfelde and, especially, with his brother, John Heartfield, with whom, after joining the Berlin Dada movement, he designed scenery and, above all, began to experiment with collage and photomontage in 1919, while at the same time continuing to produce paintings. The following year he presented his first solo exhibition, in Munich. He was a member of the Communist Party and regularly published his illustrations in publications connected with it. The radical nature of his work landed him in court on several occasions, accused of blasphemy and amorality. In 1924 he presented his first solo exhibition in Paris, and the following year he took part in the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim.
In 1931 he exhibited in New York for the first time. The next year he was invited by the Art Students League to give summer courses. An idyllic view of America, formed from what he had read as a child and the turbulent political situation in Germany led him, in 1933, to move to the United States, where he remained until 1951. He became an American citizen in 1938 and continued teaching. At the same time he was active as an artist, initially producing watercolours that reflected his enthusiasm at the impact of America, and then, after the war, progressing to oil-paintings in which he expressed the gloom and despair that he felt at the birth of the atomic age. In 1954 the first major retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum. That year he made a visit to Germany and later returned definitively, a few months before his death.