Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"William Gropper’s sidewalk chalk drawings near his home in the poor ghettos of Manhattan’s Lower East Side led to an invitation to study at the Ferrer School, NY. He would go on to convert the realistic, nonpolitical art of his teachers, Ashcan artists Robert Henri and George Bellows, into his own passionate, satirical art.
Gropper joined the staff of the NY Tribune (1920) as a political cartoonist. They soon dismissed him for his left-wing sympathies. He quickly found freelance work for such publications as Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. During the 1930s he received several mural commissions with support from Roosevelt’s New Deal art program that provided funding from the US government for art production.
Like many Social Realists of the time, Gropper became increasingly political. His subjects center on the plight of migrant laborers, striking factory workers, the downtrodden, etc. He also made bold, satirical representations of businessmen and politicians – expressive works that essentially fuse Daumier’s caricature with New Objectivity painting from turn-of-the-century Germany.
As it was the same government he attacked that had provided much of Gropper’s funding, it is no surprise that his work was eventually labeled “subversive.” He was subpoenaed in 1953 to testify before McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee where he pleaded the Fifth, suffering a loss of popularity thereafter.
Gropper used his caustic prints as a most potent weapon for launching attacks against big business and the political right. One can only regard Purdue’s Mother and Child lithograph as confusing among Gropper’s larger body of work. It closely resembles the prints of Picasso, drawing on spiritual Primitivism, Cubism, and a Madonna/child precedent. It lacks Gropper’s characteristic level of detail and all caricatured qualities, especially in the face. Here Gropper has severely simplified form, only vaguely maintaining the sharp, angular lines typical of many of his figures.
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