Serendipity is real—those moments when you’re on the way to somewhere else and accidentally stumble on an entirely different but just as rewarding destination. That happened to me in Berlin last summer as I was walking from one Art Nouveau subway station to take pictures of another. I was passing a small gated entrance when my attention was caught by a quarreling couple at the gate; just behind them was this sign:
I admit my first reaction was a chuckle; the artist George Grosz’s name at birth was Georg Gross, and that would make the sign ‘The Little Big Museum.’ But, as a long-time fan of Grosz’s political and satirical work, my second reaction was ‘How did I not know this was here?’
The answer, in part, is that until recently it wasn’t, and in fact is only certain to still be there until 2027. The site is a former Shell gas station which art dealer and collector Juerg Judin turned into a home and studio in 2009. In 2022, he gave a five-year lease to an association of Grosz enthusiasts to use the building as a museum. Many of the works on view come from his collection.
Fittingly, it’s in a neighborhood where he once lived and worked, including with Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, next to the station I was walking to. Grosz’s theater work was unknown to me; like most people, I’ve been most familiar with his sharp and sometimes cynical sketches of life in Weimar, Germany, a period marked by poverty for many, excess wealth and display for the richest, and the rise of the Nazi movement.
Grosz, born in 1893 to a Berlin pub owner and his wife, started art lessons when he was 8, with a weekly drawing class, where he honed his skills by drawing meticulous copies of bar scenes and battle scenes, but by age 15 he managed to be expelled for insubordination. He continued his art studies elsewhere, and sold his first work, a satirical drawing, to a magazine in 1910.
After a brief few months of military service at the beginning of World War I he was discharged for medical reasons. He had enlisted in the belief that those who waited to be drafted were more likely to be sent to the front. During the war, he and his artist friend Helmut Herzfeld changed their names to English versions to ‘de-Germanize and internationalize’ themselves, becoming George Grosz and John Heartfield.
In the post-war period Grosz, by then a member of the Spartacist League and ultimately the German Communist Party, continued his pen-and-ink attacks on the attitudes and actions of the capitalist and nationalist sectors in the new republic, but broke with the party in 1924 over its arts policy. The break made no noticeable change in his political sympathies. In the first example above he shows German industry begging France for loans. The second, showing workers executed for rebellion as capitalist watch has the ironic caption “Dear Fatherland, Have no Fear, while the third, “Be Servile to Authority” notes the role of the churches.
As political as it gets… a 1927 reminder from the previous war; the coins of the capitalists feed the media which salutes nationalism and war preparations: “Every shot hits a Russian! Down with Serbia! God punish England! Every blow strike a Frenchman!”
Grosz continued not only in pen and ink, but in other media, touching upon aspects of life in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, sometimes with almost violent effect, and sometimes with the quiet poignancy seen in Third Class Funeral (1930) above.
During the 1920s he also took time to continue with theater work, designing set and costumes for a number of productions. The Egyptian-themed set and costumes were for a 1920 production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, while the animal figures were drawn in 1922 for Methusaleh, a play by Yvan Goll.
The toils of bureaucracy take an almost whimsical form in The Paragraph Tree, and Man Strangled by Giant Paragraph, both drawn for the 1928 production of Schweik.
One of Grosz’s closest collaborators and friends was Bertolt Brecht, seen in a Grosz caricature as a man busy with all things and ideas; the sketch was made during their collaboration with Piscator on Schweik. The photo of Grosz himself is also from that period.
By the beginning of the 1930s, Grosz became increasingly certain the Nazis would come to power, and that there would be no future for him in Germany; he has already been attacked by them as a “degenerate artist.” In 1933, he moved, with his wife and sons, to New York, where he found work both as a magazine illustrator and as an important teacher at the Art Students League. But he left behind not only Nazi Germany, but seemingly his activism. His work in the U.S. never found a full political bite, except perhaps the 1944 Cain, or Hitler in Hell.
In the aftermath of World War II, another major work, The Painter of the Hole II, shows an angry and disillusioned-looking artist with a despairing view of the world and of the future of art and perhaps its past ideas as well. On another level, some have seen it as an attack on Abstract Expressionism as much as a political statement.
The museum, and Grosz, also make time for a lighter side, and one of my favorite works on display: An illustrated letter to his sons, Peter and Martin, about their trip into exile, with sketches of the ship, New York, and various marine life, including Otto the Swordfish and Max the Flounder with his umbrella.
Grosz returned to Berlin in 1959, but died shortly after.
