The Art Scab George Grosz, Berlin Dada, and the Spartacus League
The Art Scab
George Grosz, Berlin Dada, and the Spartacus League
I. Introduction
A. Topic During post World War I Germany, the Weimar Republic was established as bourgeois capitalistic democracy. However, the period was plagued with income inequality, corruption, and authoritarianism. At the start of this period, the German Revolution spread around the country. In Berlin, the Spartacus League, founded as a communist alternative to the Socialist Democrats of Germany party, was pushing for a workers revolution to put in place a Communist system. The Spartacus League’s radical message, as spoken through their leader Rosa Luxemburg, would inspire the art of a young Dada artist George Grosz. A former soldier in WWI, he was an anti-war artist of paintings and cartoons who in 1917 joined forces with other radical artists in the Berlin version of Dada. By 1918, Grosz offically joinded the Spartacus League, and used Luxemburg's ideas of a "spontaneous revolution" with both his style and means of distrubiting his art.
B. Thesis From 1917 to the end of Spartacist Uprising in August of 1919 George Grosz employed the avant-garde techniques of Berlin Dada in order to propagandize for the spontaneous and continuous revolution that Luxemburg and the Spartacists supported. Grosz achieved this by producing paintings that attack the bourgeois class, caricatures that attacked the military and political leaders with political commentary that accompanied the caricatures, and collaborating on publications and street performances to spread the Spartacist ideology.
C. Methodology This paper will be using a Marxist materialist approach to examine how the stratified Berlin society produced an environment that was both a catalyst and muse to Grosz. The communist political philosophy of the Spartacists was a variant of Left-wing Communism that rejected authoritarian figures, such as the dictator of the proletariat, for goverment by the people directly using unions. Therefore, the
George Grosz, Berlin Dada, and the Spartacus League
I. Introduction
A. Topic During post World War I Germany, the Weimar Republic was established as bourgeois capitalistic democracy. However, the period was plagued with income inequality, corruption, and authoritarianism. At the start of this period, the German Revolution spread around the country. In Berlin, the Spartacus League, founded as a communist alternative to the Socialist Democrats of Germany party, was pushing for a workers revolution to put in place a Communist system. The Spartacus League’s radical message, as spoken through their leader Rosa Luxemburg, would inspire the art of a young Dada artist George Grosz. A former soldier in WWI, he was an anti-war artist of paintings and cartoons who in 1917 joined forces with other radical artists in the Berlin version of Dada. By 1918, Grosz offically joinded the Spartacus League, and used Luxemburg's ideas of a "spontaneous revolution" with both his style and means of distrubiting his art.
B. Thesis From 1917 to the end of Spartacist Uprising in August of 1919 George Grosz employed the avant-garde techniques of Berlin Dada in order to propagandize for the spontaneous and continuous revolution that Luxemburg and the Spartacists supported. Grosz achieved this by producing paintings that attack the bourgeois class, caricatures that attacked the military and political leaders with political commentary that accompanied the caricatures, and collaborating on publications and street performances to spread the Spartacist ideology.
C. Methodology This paper will be using a Marxist materialist approach to examine how the stratified Berlin society produced an environment that was both a catalyst and muse to Grosz. The communist political philosophy of the Spartacists was a variant of Left-wing Communism that rejected authoritarian figures, such as the dictator of the proletariat, for goverment by the people directly using unions. Therefore, the