Hess, Hans : George Grosz

Grosz acerbic satirical art and ironic pessimism was an artistic and political response to German militarism with the rise of extreme right wing pugilistic movements post WW1, culminating in Nazism. He documented the social dislocation of the immediate post war era , though he was not the only German artist to ridicule the hypocrisy of the German establishment and to debunk their pieties. He was joined by other artists like Otto Dix , Georg Scholz, Rudolf Schlichter and Hannah Hoch. Expressionist in style but Influenced by Dadaism they used the Comic grotesque as means of social and cultural criticism. No other European country outside Germany produced such intense revolutionary art in 1920- 30’s to denigrate the socioeconomic status quo. The Mexican muralists on the other side of the world came close, though they did not use to the same extent the grotesque comic for their purpose.