A major feature of German art in the early 20th century until 1933 was a boom in the production of works of art of a grotesque style. Artists using the Satirical-Grotesque genre included George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, at least in their works of the 1920s. Dada in Germany, the leading practitioners of which were Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch, was centered in Berlin, where it tended to be more politically oriented than Dada groups elsewhere. They made important contributions to the development of collage as a medium for political commentary- Schwitters later developed his Merzbau, a forerunner of installation art. Dix and Grosz were also associated with the Berlin Dada group. Max Ernst led a Dada group in Cologne, where he also practiced collage, but with a greater interest in Gothic fantasy than in overt political content- this hastened his transition into surrealism, of which he became the leading German practitioner. The Swiss-born Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and others experimented with cubism.
