American Art Collaborative

Condemned by the Nazi regime as a "degenerate" for his bitter social satire, Grosz made his way to the United States in 1932, where he taught at the Art Students league in New York. In 1952, Dallas merchant Leon Harris commissioned a series of pictures from Grosz in which the artist was asked to capture "Dallas, its People, its Industries, its Character." In "Cotton Harvest, Dallas," Grosz expressed his sympathy with the backbreaking labor of the cotton fields. The harvesters are bent to their work under a hot, oppressively heavy sky, their human forms distorted by the swollen sacks of cotton dragging behind them.