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William Gropper was born in New York in 1897. He studied under Robert Henri and George Bellows (1912-13) and became associated with the Ash-Can Group of social realist artists. A socialist, he had his cartoons published in radical journals such as the Revolutionary Age, Liberator, and the New Masses.

Gropper also worked for mainstream newspapers such as the New York Tribune (1917-21) and the New York World (1925-31). Gropper also had his work published in the The Dial, The Nation, New York Post, New Yorker, The Quill, Bookman and Vanity Fair.

In 1927 Gropper accompanied the writers Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis on a tour of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s he visited the prairie states and this resulted in a series of paintings on the Dust Bowl.

 

William Gropper, Vanity Fair (August, 1935)

 

Gropper also painted and he had his first one-man show at the ACA galleries in 1936. Gropper's work reflected a keen sense of social injustice and both his paintings and graphics were extremely influential during the Great Depression. He also attacked the growth of fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan and a cartoon of Emperor Hirohito that appeared in Vanity Fair in August 1935 caused a diplomatic incident with the Japanese government demanding an official apology.

After the Second World War Gropper became increasingly concerned with the growth of the extreme right in the United States. His attacks on Joseph McCarthy led to him being called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee in May 1953. Gropper refused to answer any questions and claimed that the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution gave him the right to do this. Although blacklisted, Gropper, unlike the Hollywood Ten, who pleaded the 5th, was not imprisoned for taking this action.

William Gropper died in 1977.

William Gropper, Bill of Rights (1953)

 

 

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(1) Max Eastman, Love and Revolution (1964)

There was one big difference between the Masses and the Liberator; in the latter we abandoned the pretense of being a co-operative. Crystal Eastman and I owned the Liberator, fifty-one shares of it, and we raised enough money so that we could pay solid sums for contributions.

The list of contributing editors, largely brought over from the Masses, reads as follows: Cornelia Barns, Howard Brubaker, Hugo Gellert, Arturo Giovannitti, Charles T. Hallinan, Helen Keller, Ellen La Motte, Robert Minor, John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Charles Wood, Art Young.

Later Claude McKay, the Negro poet, became an associate editor. At a New Year's party in 1921, we elected Michael Gold and William Gropper to the staff - two opposite poles of a magnet: Gropper as instinctively comic an artist as ever touched pen to paper, and Gold almost equally gifted with pathos and tears.

 

 

William Gropper, New Masses (May, 1933)

 

 

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