The first two years saw the production mostly of street scenes and cityscapes that stylistically followed in the vein of the Berlin years. Soon, however, cracks began to appear in the hopeful dreams, pessimism and depression caught up with Grosz. The commercial success he had hoped for never materialised, he increasingly saw his teaching job as a burden, and news from Europe – not only from Germany, also from the Spanish civil war – confirmed his worst fears. When in late 1935 Grosz once again began to paint in oil, he produced extremely gloomy landscapes alongside family portraits and still lifes. More and more he felt a kinship with old masters like Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, whose premonitions of the Thirty Years’ War inspired him, on the eve of World War II, to depict the apocalypse in a style reminiscent of the old masters.

At the same time, Grosz was working as an illustrator for publications such as “Esquire” and “Vanity Fair”, and contributed drawings to short stories by Ben Hecht and O. Henry. But these activities, too, bore with them disappointments: his large, carefully executed works were often reduced to mere stamp-size. “Oddly enough, I was never able to approach the very simplicity and normality of American illustration that I admired so much.” In 1936 he tried to replicate his major successes of the 1920s, “Ecce Homo” and “Der Spießer-Spiegel”, with the portfolio “Interregnum”. Similar success, however, was not forthcoming.

Grosz found moments of happiness with his wife Eva and his sons Peter and Martin on the beaches of Cape Cod. A number of drawings, watercolours and oil paintings of the dune landscape attest to Grosz’ fascination with nature as an artistic topic: the dunes are populated by naked women in more or less explicit poses – and even those landscapes devoid of people remain charged with an obvious eroticism. The quiet landscapes and nudes were cause for criticism and disappointment among old friends and admirers. Grosz confessed to being a “romantic”, and cited Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes, why should I not contradict myself?” This sentence is key to understanding his artistic personality – particularly of the American years. For here he created not only landscapes and acts, but at the same time highly political works, which Grosz called “images of hell”. In these works, where he gives up on beauty for the sake of a drastic imagery, he conjures up the end of civilisation and sees hell on earth come to pass. He reacted with artistic rage to the torture and murder of his old friend Erich Mühsam by the Nazis and to the stories told by the writer Hans Borchardt after his escape from a concentration camp. The longed-for end of the war brought with it the recognition that humanity was now threatened with a nuclear apocalypse. The “Stickmen”, post-nuclear creatures without bodies, are Grosz’ last major group of works, culminating in the haunting “Painter of the Hole”. He bade farewell to America with a group of collages – a joyful return to a technique of the Berlin years: “You stay dada all your life.” Grosz died in July 1959, only a few months after returning to Berlin.

“When he finally returned from New York to Berlin in 1959 he remarked in surprise how American the city had become. With this comment, Grosz had returned home in a number of ways. George Grosz, his art and his biography exemplify the life of artists and intellectuals in the 20th century, as well as Germany’s glory and misery in this century. In this sense, too, Grosz is an epochal figure.”

— Peter-Klaus Schuster