Art: 20 Years of Gropper

Since 1920 Cartoonist William Gropper has been busy as a beaver, trying to gnaw down the capitalist system. One day that year Manhattan’s Tribune rashly sent Gropper to caricature an I. W. W. rally. Instead, he became a convert. This week Manhattanites from Red to pink and some who just like pictures celebrated “20 Years of Bill Gropper” with a show of his recent paintings at the A. C. A. Gallery, a Gropper monograph (36 reproductions, text by self-taught fellow Artist Joe Jones), a rousing rally in Mecca Temple.

But this kind of hullabaloo could not obscure the most important fact: quiet, stocky William Gropper, a punch-packing cartoonist, is a still better painter. He paints as he draws, quickly and simply, without benefit of model, in reds, blues, yellows, whites. His masters are Breughel, Goya and Daumier. He does not disgrace them. Typically class-conscious canvases at the A. C. A. show: The Shoemaker, who is mending other men’s shoes while barefoot himself; Brenda in a Tantrum, which shows 1939’s Glamor Girl No. 1 streaming indignantly through the air; Art Patrons (see cut), a jut-jawed couple gazing bleakly at a picture they dislike. Without a message were Hallowe’en, Artist Gropper’s small son Lee, in a gaudy pirate’s costume, grinning out from under a cocked hat of newspapers, and The Kibitzer, an absorbed youth eying a poker player’s royal flush.

For the Freiheit, Manhattan’s Yiddish Communist paper, Bill Gropper does a daily cartoon, gets paid when the Freiheit can afford it. Without pay he cheerfully draws for the New Masses, the Sunday Worker. He makes his living free-lancing for capitalist publications, from Vogue to FORTUNE, painting murals for bars, hotels, Government buildings. His conservative employers run no risk of embarrassment. “To paint a mural that doesn’t fit the place would be like painting swastikas in a synagogue,” observes Artist Gropper. “If I were to paint a proletarian scene in a post office, Farley would jump out of his pants. My only interest, where I haven’t got a free hand, is to do as good a job as possible.”

William Gropper was born 42 years ago on Manhattan’s lower East Side, on his way to school used to lug to a sweatshop the bundles of piecework sewing his mother did at home. Later he worked in a clothing store at $5 a week, took night art classes till he got his job on the Tribune. In Cropper’s phrase he “fired the Tribune” after his I. W. W. conversion, became successively a labor organizer, oiler on a freight boat, itinerant sign painter.

In 1924 Bill Gropper married Bacteriologist Sophie Frankle. The two of them built their own nine-room stone house (“bourgeois as hell”) at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y. Soon after their marriage they had a year in Russia, where Gropper worked briefly on Pravda (official organ of the Communist Party), learned to call electric lights “Lenin lamps,” had a grand time. Gene, their elder boy, was born in Paris on the return trip. To the New Masses went a cartoon by Artist Morris Pass of the proud father wheeling Gene in a baby carriage. Caption: “Made in the U. S. S. R.”