George Grosz and the Communist Party

by Barbara McCloskey

George Grosz (1893-1959) occupied the forefront of German Expressionism, Dadaism, and New Objectivity in the years before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the aftermath of World War I, the November Revolution, and the founding of the German Communist Party in 1918, Grosz also became the Communist Party's leading and most notorious artist. Here, however, Barbara McCloskey shows that Grosz's art and activities were equally, if not more, controversial for the Communist Party in whose name Grosz carried out his work. Drawing on Communist Party press reports, documents, and congress proceedings, McCloskey explores for the first time Grosz's changing involvement with the Party and provides a vivid history of the often tense and uncertain relationship between vanguard art and revolutionary politics during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. Continuing her account with his emigration to New York in 1933, McCloskey documents Grosz's interaction with prominent members of New York's ant