Lot 52

GEORGE E. GROSZ (GERMAN, 1893-1959)

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GEORGE E. GROSZ (GERMAN, 1893-1959)

Estimate: $5,000 - $8,000

Starting Bid: $2,500

(0 Bids)

by Selkirk Auctioneers & Appraisers
June 27, 2026 10:00 AM CDT
Live Auction
555 Washington Avenue Suite 129
St. Louis, MO, US 63101

George E. Grosz
German, 1893-1959
Reclining Nude
Graphite on paper laid on card
Signed and dated '39 lower left. Sketch of a nude woman, matted and framed.

Born in Berlin in 1893, Grosz was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts in Dresden at the age of 16, where he studied under draftsman Richard Müller. He returned to Berlin in 1910 to study at the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1914, Grosz, like many of his generation, volunteered for service in World War I. He was discharged not once, but twice, and his own experience of battlefields, death and destruction had a profound impact on not only his artistic approach but his overall worldview. He became a misanthropist and a Utopian. During the 1920s, Grosz's artistic style expressed his disgust with postwar Germany. Grosz held his first solo exhibition in 1920 at the Neue Kunst/Hans Goltz gallery in Munich and took part in the First International Dada Exhibition in Berlin, where his drawings were confiscated by police. A cofounder of the Berlin Dada movement, Grosz was featured centrally in the Nazis' Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937 and stripped of his German citizenship in 1938. By this time, however, he had already moved to the United States in 1933, where he taught at the Art Students' League in New York and opened a painting school with artist Maurice Stern. In 1937, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and produced oil paintings of apocalyptic landscapes and war scenes. The following year he became an U.S. citizen. From 1939, Grosz spent the summer months in Cape Cod, and from the end of the 1930s he created erotic, revealing nudes here, for which his wife Eva usually modelled. Grosz was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 which later toured the United States. In 1946 he published his autobiography and returned to Berlin in 1959, where he died on July 5.

  • Dimensions: 11 1/2 x 16 3/4 in. (29.2 x 42.5 cm.), Frame: 19 3/4 x 26 1/4 in. (50.2 x 66.7 cm.)
  • Medium: Graphite on paper laid on card
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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $29 $5
$30 $99 $10
$100 $499 $25
$500 $999 $50
$1,000 $2,999 $100
$3,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $29,999 $1,000
$30,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $299,999 $10,000
$300,000 $499,999 $25,000
$500,000 + $50,000