Art: Durable Rebel

At the age of 64, Painter William Gropper is, as one Manhattan critic wrote last week, “one of the honorable old guard of American painting.” But the phrase should not be taken to mean that age has neutralized the acid of his style. As his new exhibition at the ACA Gallery proves, Gropper still paints villainous politicians and overstuffed capitalists—all the targets that were so in vogue in the 1930s. Yet essentially his paintings are scenes of human foolishness and tragedy, and these constants carry no date.

It would be strange if Gropper were not concerned with the flaws of society, for his early life followed closely the standard biography of the typical young radical. He was born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a land of pushcarts and bewildered immigrants finding their way in a new world. His father had a gift for languages, but none at all for keeping a job. His mother took in piecework sewing, and Gropper himself, once he had quit school, worked as an errand boy for a clothing store at $5 a week. In spite of the ten-hour working day, Gropper found time to draw, and hungered for further training in art.

“Comrade Bill.” He joined a small class run by Robert Henri and George Bellows, both of whom rambled on about love, life and art and seemed to make it a point to disagree about everything. Then one day at the clothing store, young Gropper did a series of political caricatures that someone took to Garret Garrett, assistant editor of the old New York Tribune. Gropper soon found himself a full-fledged cartoonist making $40 a week. When he became enraptured by the Redlining I.W.W., the Tribune dropped him, but by then he was established. He worked for every sort of publication, from the New Masses to Spur, from Dial to Vanity Fair, where the aristocratic Frank Crowninshield fondly called him “Comrade Bill.”

An extraordinarily gentle and soft-spoken person, Gropper seemed the angriest of men on canvas. His paunchy bosses, downtrodden workers and wounded soldiers not only parroted the party line and mirrored the headlines but were a staple of the artistic diet. After World War II, taste in art changed, and to look at a Gropper painting became rather like rereading Grapes of Wrath. American art became less interested in humanity, downtrodden or otherwise, than in art for its own sake.

“The Need for a Friend.” Such impersonality was unbearable to Gropper: “I need to find the human element the way I need to find a friend.” Strangely, after the long reign of the abstractionists, Cropper’s work looks not like a set of period pieces but like something almost new. In him, the cartoonist, the caricaturist and the artist are jumbled up together, and sometimes the cartoonist overrides the artist.

Even at their most naive, the paintings have a rare compassion. Small boys look out upon the world with eyes filled with wonder; an old woman stands in front of a clock that ticks away her life. The stock oppressors—the politicians and the plutocrats—are used only to show artist’s concern for the oppressed. His work is in a durable tradition: a Gropper senator does not date any more than a Daumier judge or a Prussian officer by George Grosz. In Gropper, the “old guard” seems amazingly young.