William Gropper was born in 1897 on New York's Lower East Side, to a large, poor Jewish family. As a child, he worked in a garment district sweatshop as did his mother and numerous siblings, an environment that influenced his lifelong empathy with workers, his support of labor unions and his distrust of big business. He attended art classes part time, first at the Ferrer School where he met and studied with many prominent artists, and then at the New School of Fine and Applied Art.

His first work as a political cartoonist was at the New York Tribune, a conservative, anti-communist newspaper that fired him two years later when his left-leaning politics, and cartoons made anonymously for the Rebel Worker, became known publicly. The Gropper style developed during subsequent years as he contributed work to various socialist publications. However, his work was also seen in other publications such as Vanity Fair, New York American, New Republic, The Nation and the New York Tribune. His prints and paintings were featured at one-man shows throughout the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased two of his paintings and he received awards for his work from numerous sources. He was also commissioned to paint murals for the Interior Building in Wash., D.C., the State of Pennsylvania and a post office in Detroit.

Throughout his life, Gropper continued to study the masters including Rembrandt, El Greco, Breughel, Bosch, and Grunewald and more recent masters such as Daumier, Goya, Gericault and Cezanne. Gropper's paintings on folklore and American landscapes have often been compared with the regionalists. When Gropper approached the American myth as subject, it was often with his biting humor as well as pride. The last major influence on Gropper was Cubism, the force that permeated so much of 20th century painting.

Gropper’s best-known subject matter is the satiric caricature of America's wealthy and powerful, of politicians, and moguls of business and industry. Ironically it was wealthy collectors who sought these images for their collections.

The exhibition, A NATION'S CONSCIENCE, which premiered at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in 1997, was curated by Charlotte Sherman and Benjamin Horowitz of The Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, in association with the Gropper Estate  It includes 40 paintings,10 cartoon reproductions and text panels with an introduction to the artist’s work and his Curriculum Vitae. This exhibition presents an opportunity to view a survey of the works of  William Gropper, who has achieved an important place in the annals of American Art. 

William Gropper was born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1897 to parents who worked for small wages in sweatshops. Although his Father was a scholarly man with knowledge of eight languages, he had limited work opportunity. His mother was a seamstress, a subject that he painted over and over again. At fourteen Bill Gropper left school and began working 72 hours a week, for $5.00, with no overtime pay. It is this beginning in the proletarian work that gave Gropper his keen social consciousness and his great concern for the downtrodden and the victims of injustice. His best-known subject matter is the biting caricature of America’s wealthy and powerful, of politicians, moguls of business and industry. Ironically it was these wealthy collectors who sought these images for their collections.

Much of Gropper’s artistic philosophy can be understood when one considers the influence of Robert Henri and George Bellows with whom he studied. In this atmosphere, artists were encouraged to develop their personal belief in the nature of art. They insisted that each artist must be himself/herself; a human being, living and working in the real world. Gropper has said, “Right then, I began to realize that you don’t paint with color-you paint with conviction, freedom, love and heart-aches, with what you have.”

Throughout his life, he continued to study the masters including Rembrandt, El Greco, Breughel, Bosch and Grunewald and more recent masters such as Daumier, Goya, Gericault and Cezanne. Cropper’s painting of folklore and American landscapes have often been compared with the regionalists. When Gropper approached the American myth as subject, it was often with his biting humor as well as pride. The last major influence on Cropper was Cubism, the Force that permeated so much of 20th century painting. Cropper frequently introduced a series of angular shapes into his compositions.

There is little doubt that Bill Gropper has achieved an important place in the annals of American Art. Over the course of fifty years, he had concentrated on people. People were depicted picketing the work in sweatshops, picking crops, the mighty in the fullness of their power, and the oppressed. Frequently he turned to themes of Jewish village life in Eastern Europe. Throughout, however, his work has been much more than the mere rendering of subject matter. He has continuously shown a perfection of painterly composition.

“Gropper has a dynamic feeling for forms and their spatial relationships. Yet movement is not merely the subject of Gropper’s paintings: it exists in his handling of the masses, a quiet landscape, or in a somber scene of destruction. His artist’s eye supplants the literal fact so that even when it comes closest to the raw details of social catastrophe, the resultant visual experience is stilt, above all, on the format of aesthetic relationships.” (Freundlich, August I., William Gropper: Retrospective, The Ward Ritchie Press: Los Angeles in conjunction with the Joe and Emily Art Gallery, University of Miami,1968.)

To quote Gropper, “I react to life and its stimulant to me. It could be a phrase; it could be an attitude; it could be a mood. It’s broad, I’m open for any little thing, but I am of a period. I come from a sort of humanistic element. I love people, and when I draw or paint, it comes out of people, and the landscape is what these people make it.”

Charlotte Sherman & Benjamin Horowitz
September 1997
 

BORN:New York City - December 3, 1897. 
Died: Great Neck N.Y. 1977. 

ONE-MAN SHOWS: 
A.C.A. Galleries and other New York Galleries, Detroit, Cold Spring Harbor, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, Coral Gables, Chicago, Museum of Evansville, Ind., Cambridge, Lenox, Mass., University of Maine, New Rochelle, Fordham University, Mexico City, London, Coventry, Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Sofia, Rome, Milan, and Mexico City.

AWARDS: 
Guggenheim Fellowship, Young Israel Prize, Collier Prize, Wanamaker Prize, Carnegie International, 1st Prize Lithography “Artist for Victory” at Metropolitan Museum of Art and John Herron Art Institute, Los Angeles County Award, 1966 Ford Foundation Award For Artist in Residence, 1967 Tamarind Fellowship, 1968 Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

MURALS: 
New Interior Building, Washington, D.C., Post Office Buildings at Freeport, L.I., and Detroit, Michigan, Schenley Corporation, 1967 Designed Five Stained Glass Windows for the West Suburban Temple Har Zion, River Forest Illinois.

PUBLICATIONS:
“The Golden Land” (cartoons), ”Alan Oop” (novel in drawings), “Gropper” collection of drawings, “56 Drawings, USSR”, “American Folklore Lithographs”, “Caprichios”, “The Little Tailor” Portfolio, “Caucasian Studies” (lithographs), “Your Brother’s Blood Cries Out” (Warsaw Ghetto), “Twelve Etchings” (portfolio), William Gropper: Retrospective published 1968.

MUSEUMS: 
Metropolitan Museum, N.YC., Museum of Modern Art, N.YC., Whitney Museum of American Art, N.YC., Chicago Art Institute, Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles County Museum, St. Louis Museum, Newark Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center Library of Congress, University of Arizona, Wadsworth Atheneum, Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Encyclopedia Brittannica Collection, Abbott Art Collection, Paul Sachs Collection, Museum of Western Art, Moscow, City Museum of Sofia, National Gallery of Prague, Tel-Aviv Museum of Israel, Kharkov Museum, USSR, Biro-Bidjan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of  New York, Wellesley College, Syracuse University, IBM Collection, Joseph Hirshhorn Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Brandies University, Cornell College.
 

“That’s my heritage.  I’m from the old school, defending the underdog.  Maybe because I’ve been an underdog or still am.  I put myself in their position.  I feel for the people.  I have to face things in the most brutal way that I can and let it out and then feel better.  Maybe it’s my heredity or maybe it’s my way of life.  I can’t close my eyes and say it is the best of all possible worlds and let it go at that.  I become involved.” (Tape-recorded interview with August L. Freundlich, Miami, Florida, Spring, 1967.)

Gropper as a young man was known to do those “funny little drawings of people.” Eventually they came to the desk of a New York Tribune Assistant Editor, who hired Gropper to do small drawings and cartoon for the Sunday Magazine.  This was in 1920 and began his career. 

While working for the New York Tribune, he was send to do a story on the International Workers of the World, the radical worker’s association. From what was an assignment, began an involvement in so many other liberal causes, all of which looked to Gropper to design posters, drawings and illustrations.  With great rapidity, Gropper cartoons were published by: The Dial, Village Quill, Pagan and other underground presses.  It was in 1924 that he began to do a daily cartoons for Freiheit (a Yiddish liberal newspaper).  At the time, The New Masses and The Sunday Worker published a cartoon weekly.  In the later twenties and early thirties, Gropper’s cartoons were published by New York Post, Pearson’s, Bookman, Spur and New Yorker.   Later the New York American carried his illustrations for the Robert Benchley column.  Perhaps the most remembered cartoons, by this so very prescient artist, were for Vanity Fair.  One famous drawing, illustrated the Japanese Emperor Hirohito pulling a peace treaty in the shape of a cannon.  This single cartoon brought about the financial failure of magazine.  Almost immediately the American State Department issued a disclaimer and the Japanese government applied commercial pressure to advertisers, hence the magazine was forced to close.

Throughout his life, Gropper was fascinated by the Senate and the figures of our government.   It was when he was working for Vanity Fair, he was given the assignment to draw  the Senate. In his own words, “A long time ago, I was assigned by Vanity Fair to cover the Senate.  I stayed two or three weeks and painted the Senate as I saw it.  I think the United States Senate is the best show in the world.   If people saw it, they would know what their government is doing.”  (Tape-recorded interview with August L. Freundlich, Miami, Florida, Spring, 1967).