George Grosz valuation

George Grosz (1893–1959) was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin and grew up partly in Stolp in Pomerania, now Słupsk in Poland. He settled in Berlin in 1918 and was a founder of the Berlin Dada movement, organising and exhibiting at the First International Dada Fair, and his drawings attacked the army, the church, profiteers and the bourgeois supporters of the Weimar Republic. Collections of these drawings, among them Gott mit uns and Ecce Homo, brought prosecutions, and he was associated with New Objectivity through the 1920s. In 1932 he accepted an invitation to teach the summer semester at the Art Students League of New York, emigrated to the United States in 1933, became an American citizen in 1938 and taught at the League for many years, leaving behind the style and subjects of his Berlin work. He returned to Berlin in 1959.

Drawings, watercolours and prints come to market most often. Many drawings carry the stamp of his estate with an inventory number, and a buyer will want that stamp or another firm record, since his manner has been imitated. Prints should be checked against Alexander Dückers's catalogue of the printed work, published in 1979, for the edition, the paper and whether the sheet is signed or comes from a published portfolio or book. The American work is collected separately from the Berlin drawings of the 1910s and 1920s. Works on paper should be checked for fading, foxing and tears.