Biographical/Historical Information
George Grosz (July 26, 1893- July 6, 1959) was a German artist whose caricatures and paintings provided some of the most vitriolic social criticism of his time. After studying art in Dresden and Berlin from 1909 to 1912, Grosz sold caricatures to magazines and spent time in Paris during 1913. When World War I broke out, he volunteered for the infantry, but he was invalided in 1915 and moved into a garret studio in Berlin. There he sketched prostitutes, disfigured veterans, and other personifications of the ravages of war. In 1917 he was recalled to the army as a trainer, but shortly thereafter he was placed in a military asylum and was discharged as unfit. By the war’s end in 1918, Grosz had developed an unmistakable graphic style that combined a highly expressive use of line with ferocious social caricature. Out of his wartime experiences and his observations of chaotic postwar Germany grew a series of drawings savagely attacking militarism, war profiteering, the gulf between rich and poor, social decadence, and Nazism. Gradually, Grosz became associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) movement, which embraced realism as a tool of satirical social criticism. After immigrating to the United States in 1933 to teach at the Art Students League in New York City, Grosz’s work became less misanthropic, as he drew magazine cartoons, nudes, and landscapes. He became a U.S. citizen in 1938. Grosz died in West Berlin about three weeks after returning to his native country for a visit. (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)
Margo Wolff was born in Stettin in 1909. She worked as a journalist in Berlin. After 1933, she emigrated to France, where she was arrested and sent to Gurs. She managed to escape to Marseilles, where she helped groups of children to escape to Switzerland and Spain. After the war, she worked as a journalist for Maccabi (later Juedische Rundschau) and was sent to the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1946. In 1949 she emigrated to New York. She received an M.A. degree from the New School for a thesis about youth aliyah in 1951. She worked for the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau and visited Germany frequently to lecture. In 1986 she published her memoirs of her time in Marseilles: "The boys of Mon Repos; the rescue operation 'Sesame' from Vichy France". She also translated David Ben-Gurion's memoirs. She was married to Hugo Doeblin. Margo Wolff died in Miami in 1990.
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Citation
Grosz, George: [60], Leo Baeck Institute, 90.56.