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William Gropper

American, 1897-1977

BiographyWilliam Victor "Bill" Gropper,1897 –1977, was a U.S. cartoonist, painter, lithographer, and muralist. A committed radical, Gropper is best known for the political work which he contributed to such left wing publications as The Revolutionary Age, The Liberator, The New Masses, The Worker, and The Morning Freiheit.

William "Bill" Gropper was born to Harry and Jenny Gropper in New York City, the eldest of 6 children. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, who were both employed in the city's garment industry, living in poverty on New York's Lower East Side. Harry Gropper, Bill's father, was university-educated and fluent in 8 languages, but was unable to find employment in America in a field for which he was suited. Young Bill's interest in art began at a young age. At 6, William took chalk to the sidewalks, decorating the concrete with elaborate picture stories of cowboys and Indians that extended around the block. At age 13, Bill took his first art instruction at the radical Ferrer School, where he studied under George Bellows and Robert Henri. In 1913, Bill graduated from public school, earning a medal in art and a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. The strong-willed Gropper refused to conform at the academy, however, and was subsequently expelled. n 1915, Bill showed a portfolio of his work to Frank Parsons, the head of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. The work so impressed Parsons that Gropper was offered a scholarship to the school. In 1917, Gropper was offered a position on the staff of the "New York Tribune", where over the next several years he earned a steady income doing drawings for the paper's special Sunday feature articles.
Gropper also contributed his art to "The Revolutionary Age", a revolutionary socialist weekly, a publication which narrowly predated the establishment of the American Communist Party, as well as to "The Rebel Worker", a magazine of the Industrial Workers of the World, an anarcho-syndicalist union. In 1920, Gropper went to Cuba briefly as an oiler on a United Fruit Company freight boat. He left the ship in Cuba and spent some time there observing life and working as a supervisor on a railroad construction detail. In January 1921, editor Max Eastman formally made Bill a special contributor and member of the staff of "The Liberator". His time at the publication was not harmonious and give up his post to visit Soviet Russia in 1922. During the early 1920s, Gropper was a free lance contributor of work to such mainstream magazines as "The Bookman" (for which he drew caricatures of authors), the liberal magazine "The Dial", and Frank Harris' "New Pearson's Magazine". Despite his contributions to a vast array of communist publications, Gropper was never formally a member of the Communist Party USA. In 1927, Gropper went on a tour of Soviet Russia along with the novelists Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. During the second half of the 1930s, Gropper dedicated his art to the efforts to raise popular opposition to fascism in Europe. Due to his involvement with radical politics in the 1920s and 1930s, Gropper was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. The experience provided inspirational fodder for a series of fifty lithographs entitled" the Caprichos'. Following World War II, Gropper traveled to Poland to attend the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace of 1948 in Wrocław. Afterwards, he decided to pay tribute to the Jews who died in the Holocaust by painting one picture on the theme of Jewish life each year. In 1974, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.

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