Georg Scholz

Georg Scholz was born on 10 October 1890 in Wolfenbuttel, Germany. He began formal training in 1908 at the Grand Ducal Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe (the Badische Landeskunstschule), studying under Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Trubner, and later studied in Berlin under Lovis Corinth. He served in the German army during the First World War from 1915 to 1918 and resumed painting afterward, developing a style that absorbed elements of Cubism and Futurism before settling into a sharply drawn realism.

In 1919 Scholz joined the Communist Party of Germany, and his early postwar paintings offered pointed critiques of Germany's social and economic conditions. He took part in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, and his 1920 imagery of industrial farmers is among the works most associated with his mature style; a lithograph version, Industrial Peasants (Industriebauern), is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. By the mid-1920s he had emerged as one of the leading painters of New Objectivity, and his work featured in the movement-defining Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, the same year he was appointed professor at the Baden State Academy of Art in Karlsruhe.

Scholz was dismissed from his teaching position in 1933 after the National Socialists took power. In 1937 he was declared a Degenerate Artist and works were seized as part of the regime's campaign against modern art, and in 1939 he was formally forbidden to paint. By 1945 he was living in Waldkirch, in the Black Forest, where French occupation authorities appointed him mayor after the war. He died there later that same year, on 27 November 1945.

Scholz's critical standing rests on his role as a leading figure of New Objectivity, a movement described in mainstream art-historical accounts as combining Old Master realist technique with a biting critique of Weimar Republic society. Standard biographical references note that no major art prizes marked his career; his only documented state honor was the Iron Cross Second Class, awarded for World War I military service rather than for his art, in contrast to the punitive attention his work drew under National Socialism, when it was included in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition. That inclusion, though a punitive act at the time, is treated by later scholarship as confirmation of his importance to the Weimar avant-garde. Renewed institutional attention has followed in the twenty-first century, with Scholz appearing in Neue Galerie New York's Weimar-era survey exhibitions across 2019 and again in its 2025 New Objectivity presentation, alongside comparable inclusion at the Bucerius Kunst Forum and the Von der Heydt-Museum.

Scholz's auction market is defined by scale rather than volume, though the exact record cannot be independently confirmed. Public aggregators report differing top figures, a reported high of approximately USD 1.63 million (FindArtInfo) and a lower figure of roughly USD 398,000 (MutualArt), and neither source's public summary identifies the underlying work, auction house, or sale date, so no specific record can be stated with confidence here. Artprice and MutualArt separately place his lifetime auction activity at roughly 124 to 182 recorded appearances, with the majority of paintings and prints selling well below either headline figure. No commercial gallery or estate currently represents Scholz. His work circulates through the secondary market, chiefly German auction houses such as Lempertz and Nagel Auktionen.

Scholz has no catalogue raisonne and no current gallery or estate representation, so acquisition happens through the secondary auction market rather than a primary market channel. Because the artist's work was subject to Nazi-era seizure beginning in 1937, provenance research and restitution history deserve particular attention for any painting or print changing hands today. Public price aggregators report conflicting top auction figures for Scholz, and neither identifies the underlying work, house, or date, so collectors should treat any reported auction high as unverified rather than a reliable benchmark, with the bulk of the market trading far lower.