George Grosz Quotes

When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o’clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.

I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.

It’s an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing ‘art’ to defend their collapsing culture.

Painting is manual labor, no different from any other; it can be done well or poorly.

How did I come to be an artist ? Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the ‘genius’ of the personage, the greater the profit.

The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.

In 1916 I was discharged from military service, or rather, given a sort of leave of absence on the understanding that I might be recalled within a few months. And so I was a free man, at least for a while.

The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood.

Peace was declared, but not all of us were drunk with joy or stricken blind.

My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the ‘depth’ that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop… A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society.

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o’clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.