William Gropper
Birth Date: December 3, 1897
Death Date: January 6, 1977
Artist Gallery
William Gropper was a leading social realist artist who highlighted the struggle of everyday Americans. His commitment to this cause stemmed from his childhood in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he was raised in crowded tenements by impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. Despite being well educated and speaking eight languages fluently, Gropper’s father was unable to find work that would support his family. As a result, both his parents made a living in the sweatshops of the city’s garment district (his father as a tailor and his mother as a seamstress), with Gropper once saying “The sweatshop kept us alive, but robbed us of our mother. She spoke only with the Singer sewing machine...” From a young age, Gropper had a desire to draw, especially as a way to cope with his living circumstances. At age 6, he began drawing in chalk on the sidewalks of New York, returning home at night with stockings torn at the knees and his father warning him against the wasteful pursuit of drawing. In school, Gropper sketched during all of his classes, causing him to consistently fail every subject except art, but this made no difference as he left high school to work as a dishwasher and delivery boy to help support his family. By this point he already knew that he wished to become an artist, and he would work numerous odd jobs throughout his life until he reached that goal. Among his early drawings are his mother hunched over a sewing machine, and Gropper himself lifting a heavy barrel as part of his job delivering food to local saloons. In 1911, when Gropper was fourteen, his 18 year old aunt perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — the deadliest industrial disaster in New York’s history — which further radicalized the artist and his concern for working people. In response to the tragedies that Gropper had experienced, he began to frequent the many areas in his neighborhood with radical activity, where drastic political, economic, and social reforms were swirling. One of the most popular radical centers was the experimental Ferrer School, part of the anarchist Modern School movement. The Ferrer School gave free art classes taught by socially conscious artists such as Robert Henri and John Sloan, who depicted the lives of Lower East Side residents. Gropper attended the school from 1912 until 1915, where he studied under Robert Henri, George Bellows, Man Ray, and William Glackens. This is where he was introduced to the theory that would have a lasting impact on him — that a composition should have meaning behind it, and the stronger the belief of the artist, the more honest and meaningful the composition would be. Also around this time, Gropper briefly attended the National Academy of Design, but was expelled after finding the institution to be too rigid and contradictory to his views, not allowing students to study from the live figure, which Gropper had done at Ferrer. The expulsion didn’t affect him, however, as his work was noticed by the President of the School of Fine and Applied Arts, who offered him a scholarship to the school, where he won several prizes and began to gain a reputation as an artist, attending the school until 1918. In 1917, after seeing Gropper’s prize-winning drawings at the school, the New York Tribune offered him a position as a feature artist in the Sunday edition. Gropper’s foray into the field of the political art that he would become known for began when his friends, writers at the Irish Worker, asked him to contribute drawings to their newspaper which encouraged workers to organize — advertising rallies, demonstrations, and strikes. Gropper admired the working class and supported causes against police brutality, exploitative managers and politicians, and strike-breakers, unafraid to challenge the status quo. His work reflected his empathy for common laborers and outrage at the ills of society, depicting concerns such as the plight of migrant laborers, the long hours of sweatshop employees, and fleeing refugees in drawing, cartooning, and lithography. From this time on, due to his outspokenness in his art, Gropper was a frequent contributor to radical publications such as Masses, the Liberator, Vanity Fair, Freiheit and the Daily Worker, among others. His work for these publications was satirical, with his signature social realist style and skillful draftsmanship. Additionally, Gropper contributed to Communist publications Revolutionary Age and Voice of Labor, drawn to Communism due to its spirit of rebellion and comradeship of people with immigrant backgrounds, though his wariness of leaders didn’t exclude the politicians of the Communist party, and he occasionally conflicted with them. The Tribune, upon learning of Gropper’s radical cartoons for Communist publications, warned Gropper to stop, to which he responded by quitting the Tribune. He said, “We painters for the People must not only tell them the truth in human justice and righteousness but we must convince them.” Gropper frequently traveled to understand the subjects of his works so that through his art, he could draw attention to what he considered the injustices of American society. In Seattle he visited the scene of the 1919 strike, in West Virginia and Pittsburgh he accompanied union organizers to mines and factories, and in Boston he protested on the execution day of wrongly accused Italian immigrants. His travels included the Dust Bowl, Europe, Soviet Russia (8 months), Mexico, and Cuba, among others. In 1920, Gropper moved out of the house that he had bought for his mother with Tribune earnings and settled in Greenwich Village. His drawings continued to reach a larger audience, and he contributed to countless magazines, newspapers, and illustrated books. All the time that Gropper was producing graphic work, he was also painting, almost secretly. His paintings followed the theme of his other works, such as the aftermath of strikers being shot and killed by company guards, inspired by the strikes at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company. In 1936, Gropper exhibited his paintings for the first time and the New Yorker magazine described him as “One of the most accomplished, as well as one of the most significant artists of our generation.” From 1936 to 1944, Gropper exhibited each year and strengthened his reputation as one of the leading artists of social protest painting. The 1930s saw Gropper’s work being acquired for museum collections, such as the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1937, during the middle of the Great Depression, Gropper won a Guggenheim fellowship and received a government commission for a mural for the new Department of the Interior building in Washington DC. In the mural, titled “Construction of a Dam,” Gropper depicted working men as heroes and creators of a new America, with their struggle apparent yet powerful. In the center of the composition, Gropper placed a Black man and a white man working together, unusual since Black workers were segregated from white workers at job sites. This depiction speaks to Gropper’s views and fight for the inclusion, recognition, and fair treatment of minorities. The 15 x 9 foot mural is still in existence today, in addition to several other murals that Gropper painted for the WPA relief program for artists in the 1930s. When the Senate eliminated the WPA, Gropper responded with artwork which voiced his disappointment, traveling to Washington with other artists and distributing their cartoons in pamphlets to congressmen. In 1943 Gropper was selected by the War Department Art Advisory Committee to document the war front in Africa. In August of that same year he wrote an article for Morning Freiheit, published alongside his drawings about the Holocaust, in which he stated, “I cannot remain silent and watch as my Jewish brothers and sisters are murdered. I want to protest, scream, fight, and save the lives of the Jewish people. As a Jew, as one who is connected to the fate of humanity, I paint pictures as a protest against the injustices that are being perpetrated against innocent people.” During the second world war, Gropper produced anti-Nazi cartoons, pamphlets, and war bond posters, and it’s suspected that Gropper made more anti-Hitler published art than any other artist. Due to his activism and advocacy for the common worker, the Soviet Union invited Gropper as a guest of honor for the 10th anniversary of the state. His relationship with the nation was clearly strong, as Gropper worked in Moscow for the official Communist party newspaper for over a year. This later proved detrimental to the artist, when during Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, Gropper was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate due to his suspected Communist ideas and connection with the Soviets. Gropper took the Fifth Amendment, and as a result, he underwent several hardships for the next few years: FBI agents harassed him, his neighbors, and his galleries, as well as showing up at family member weddings and funerals; his telephone was tapped and his mail opened, he and his children received threats, he could not sell his house or secure a loan, and he was blacklisted — no longer able to exhibit. He was one of the first artists to suffer this fate, which affected him until the end of his life. In response, Gropper made his “Capriccios” series of 50 lithographs that he produced between 1953 and 1956 showing the injustice of the trial. His blacklisting was detrimental to his artistic career, and his income suffered severely. Additionally, the postwar rise of abstract painting and the declining acceptance of social realist art added further difficulties to Gropper’s career in the 1950s, and in response he opened a gallery with his wife and son in 1953 where they built and sold picture frames. From 1950 to 1966, Gropper was able to exhibit his work in New York City, New Haven, Detroit, Los Angeles, and London, among other cities. He continued his themes of social criticism in caricatures, but in a more general way. His choice of subjects ranged from myth to reality to fantasy, depicting Paul Bunyan, senators, peasants, chorus girls, and dreams. Today Gropper still remains one of the most prolific satirists of the 20th century. He also made a lasting impact on the New York art scene as one of the founding members of the Artists Equity Association, promoting opportunities for artists and addressing economic issues affecting them. He worked continuously until his death in 1977, producing commentary on human rights, labor, freedom, democracy, and anarchy. His legacy can be summed up best through his own words, as he once said, “I have tried in my art to express truth, beauty, justice, and humor. We must have the capacity to express with vigor all points of view, and contribute to the development of a great American art among nations.”