Douglaston's Own: George Grosz

George Grosz fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, traveling to the United States and taking up residence along Shore Road in Douglaston.

The artist, who was the son of a Berlin pub owner, was best known for his caricatures of German life in the 1920s.

As a young boy, Grosz was encouraged to take up drawing classes and eventually went on to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Richard Muller and Oskar Schindler, and then the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts.

His early work poked fun at the rich and powerful in the Weimar Republic through crude caricatures.

In 1914, he volunteered for military service, but was discharged one year later after being hospitalized.

He was arrested during the Spartakus uprising of January 1919, but escaped using fake identification and joined the Communist Party of Germany. Two years later, he was accused of insulting the German army.

Grosz decided to leave Germany prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power due to his hatred of the Nazi party.

In 1932, he accepted a summer teaching position at the Art Students League of New York.

By 1938, he had become a naturalized citizen and was living in Douglaston. He would teach classes at the Art Students League for the next 17 years.

During this time, he exhibited his work and, in the 1950s, opened a private art school at his home.

In 1954, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Grosz’s style was influenced by Expressionism and Futurism as well as by illustration and graffiti. Several of his best-known early works include “Metropolis” and “The Funeral, which shows an out-of-control funeral procession.

Huntington’s Heckscher Museum of Art is home to Grosz’s 1926 masterpiece “Eclipse of the Sun,” which comments on Weimar corruption and depicts the sun as being eclipsed by a dollar sign.

The artist decided to live his final years in his home country, returning in the late 1950s. In 1959, he died after falling down a flight of stairs.