The faces of greed, and the faces of the victims of greed, that Grosz had drawn 80 years ago, I realized, are the faces I see around me in 21st century America. The faces of SUV drivers, and the faces of the homeless around whom SUV drivers adroitly steer.

Who Was George Grosz?
Rewards can be big for artists of the status quo. Play your creative cards right and you can even be an artist billionaire. How?

Picasso is the role-model here. It’s OK to be a little bit critical of the social-economic order. A good move is to do one big work attacking obvious brutality (the much-overrated "Guernica," for example), which makes your name as "an artist of conscience." You can then profitably continue your career of toadying reflections of the way things are.

George Grosz (1893-1959) was one of the few artists in the 20th century who dared to attempt a lifelong critique.

Though a painter, his best work was in ink: page after page of frank sketches of the terrible disparities and suffering produced by early 20th century capitalism. In Weimar Germany. In pre-Hitler Germany, his drawings were repeatedly attacked, censored, confiscated, and destroyed. One of the first acts of the Nazi’s after Hitler came to power in 1933 was to search Grosz’s Berlin studio and confiscate the drawings and paintings.

Grosz had seen what was coming and had fled to America just before the Nazi takeover. He remained in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1938.

The Nazi’s solidified his international reputation by making him part of the famous "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) exhibit in 1937. In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective.

Toward the end of his life, in the 1950s, he returned to Germany, and in fact had moved back to Berlin only a few days before his death in 1959.

Here then a sampling of this largely forgotten artist who was in fact a camera but more than an ordinary camera. For he saw beneath the surface and drew pictures of the soul.