Week 4 Part 1 GEORGE GROSZ

We just finished Lisa Larson.  She was all about the beauty of the simple form.

Now we move onto an artist who is all about DE-FORMING.

What draws me to to George Grosz is the brutal commentary through visuals.  Something about it resonates with me.  I was especially influenced by Grosz and his modern counterpart, Ralph Steadman, in the mid to late 80’s.

In your journal, do some major research on Grosz.  Use your journal as a workbook.  It’s not only practical, keeping all your work in one spot, but visually appealing.  I love the way notes look.  It’s time to roll up the sleeves and study.  Immerse yourself in the history of the time so you can get a better understanding of where is grotesque (or groszteque) images come from.

I’m using the book LUSTMORD as my main resource this week.

Georg Ehrenfried Groß [George Grosz) (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in 1933. [source]

Dadaism:

Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.  The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature. [source]

New objectivity:

The New Objectivity (in German: Neue Sachlichkeit) is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it. Rather than some goal of philosophical objectivity, it was meant to imply a turn towards practical engagement with the world—an all-business attitude, understood by Germans as intrinsically American. [source]

The Joyless Street (German: Die freudlose Gasse, 1925) is a film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst in Germany, based on the novel by Hugo Bettauer, and is one of the first films of the “New Objectivity movement. It stars Greta Garbo in her second starring role. The film is often described as a morality story in which the ‘fallen woman’ suffers for her sins, while the more virtuous woman gets the happy end.  [source]

Recommended read:

Tomorrow we’ll look at the words that came up in our research and do our first Grosz interpretation.

See also:

35 PART daily journal exercise

Weekly artist exploration/journaling series INTRO

Weekly artist exploration/journaling series Week 1 parts 1-6 FRIDA KAHLO

Weekly artist exploration/journaling series Week 2 parts 1-6 PICASSO

Weekly artist exploration/journaling series Week 3 parts 1-5 LISA LARSON

Recommended site:

Austin Kleon