George Grosz Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.

George Grosz
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.

George Grosz
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.

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

George Grosz
I see the future development of painting taking place in workshops... not in any holy temple of the arts.

George Grosz
The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, 'culture'. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture.

George Grosz
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.

George Grosz
I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.

George Grosz
I stood up as best I could to their disgusting stupidity and brutality, but I did not, of course, manage to beat them at their own game. It was a fight to the bitter end, one in which I was not defending ideals or beliefs but simply my own self.

George Grosz
In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

George Grosz
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.

George Grosz
What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

George Grosz