Word: grosz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Berlin-born George Grosz, 62, is no newcomer to scenes of horror. It has saturated his work, from his earliest sketches of World War I's mutilated and dead to such latter-day oils as The Pit (opposite), done in 1946 and now a public favorite in the Wichita (Kans.) Art Museum. A Little Yes and a Big No, the title of Grosz's autobiography, sums up his attitude to life. But though his little yes in the years since 1932, when he came to the U.S., has produced some pleasant, classic nudes and some sunlit passages...
...took only a few months at the Western front as an enlisted man in the Kaiser's infantry to turn Grosz's boyhood love of military panoply into a deep hatred of war. He was twice invalided, the second time to a military hospital for the shell-shocked and insane. After discharge Grosz found the subject that made his reputation: the postwar nightmare of inflation-ridden Berlin. Grosz glared at the world with jaundiced, penetrating eye, set down the characters he saw in portraits etched in gall: frozen-faced Prussian officers, lecherous, high-collared industrialists, black-marketeers, mutilated...
...squiggles, others the splotched fantasies of the mad. Still others are made entirely of dots, or squares, or crosshatchings, or Oriental arabesques. Some of his pictures are composed simply of illegible script-foreshadowing Cartoonist Saul Steinberg. He illustrated Candide with raggedy stick figures of the sort Giacometti and George Grosz were later to employ, and created telling juxtapositions (e.g., a bird engraved on a cat's forehead) that inspired the surrealists. He drew and painted on everything, from glass to burlap, and always with iron control. Klee's demons almost never failed him; he had them under...
Record: February 1949, "interrogated" Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty (sentenced to prison for life). November 1949, "interrogated" U.S. Businessman Robert Vogeler (15 years). April 1951, released Vogeler with a warning: "Our arms are very long." June 1951, "interrogated" Archbishop Joseph Grosz (15 years...
Hollow in Huntington. Among the most revealing was The Painter of the Hole, I, a nihilistic idyl done in 1948. It suggests that Grosz, who at 60 lives a quiet, suburban life in Huntington, N.Y., is still obsessed with despair. A hollow man sits in a Waste Land landscape daubing at a canvas on which is painted nothing but a big hole. Rats, which to Grosz represents man's conscience "always gnawing at him for the deed he did not do," chew at the easel. This painter once believed in something, explains Grosz, but now he paints only...