Grosz zählte zu den kompromisslosesten Gegnern des Nationalsozialismus, seine Kunst galt nach 1933 als „entartet". Er hielt sich ab 1932 ohnehin wegen eines Lehrauftrags in den USA auf, wurde 1938 von den deutschen Behörden ausgebürgert und erwarb die amerikanische Staatsbürgerschaft. Ab Mitte der dreißiger Jahre trat das sozialkritisch-klassenkämpferische Element in seinen Arbeiten zurück. Von nun an entstanden vorrangig Akte, Still-Leben und Landschaften, daneben die Serie der apokalyptischen „Höllenbilder". Grosz war auch als Lehrer an verschiedenen Kunstschulen tätig und legte 1946 einen Erfahrungsbericht seiner künstlerischen Tätigkeit in Form einer Autobiographie vor (A little Yes and a big No). 1954 wurde er zum Mitglied des International Institute of Arts and Letters gewählt. Kurz vor seinem Tod am 6. Juli 1959 kehrte Grosz nach Berlin zurück. 

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Pillars of Society, 1926

Marked by war and revolution, a generation of artists was born who used cutting realism to decry the social ills of post-war Germany . In this context George Grosz painted Pillars of Society, whose title ironically refers to Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name. In the 1930s this theme was taken up again and updated in critical works by John Heartfield and Oskar Nerlinger. Grosz's censure of contemporary society took on a particularly drastic form in a beer-drinking German Nationalist with a monocle, scar, and swastika, as well as an open skull out of which climbs a war horse. Behind him stands a Social Democrat, probably Eberl, President of the Republic, holding a German flag and brandishing the demagogic slogan "Socialism is work" (just don't strike). He also has an open skull. Beside him is the journalist, Alfred Hugenberg, with a palm branch in his hand and a chamber­pot on his head, a symbol of his limited intelligence. A further pillar of society is an ime­tuous clergyman who tolerates the bloodshed perpetrated behind his back by members of the Reichswehr and the right-wing veterans' associations "Stahlhelm" and "Wehrwolf." Apparently it is the military, the clergy, and the press who provide the seemingly brainless politicians with instructions to govern this chaos.

Pillars of Society

Grosz sometimes called himself a Dadaist. For him, however, Dada did not exclusively mean rejection of every tradition and convention but also possessed a political dimension. The collage or montage became his expressive medium, later complemented by such Futurist-inspired techniques as the simultaneous portrayal of multiple phases of motion. These various stylistic elements lost importance during the 1920s, however, in favor of social criticism and satirical verism. Grosz developed a typology which was effective through the use of exaggeration and deformation. Extreme close-up perspective and detail distort the object's natural ap­pearance and place it in a new, surprising context. With cutting perspicacity, exemplary situations from the real world are depicted in order to accuse the guilty and touch the viewer.Thus there arose a type of militant realism which was born of a given historical situation and which logically also ended with it.