William gropper biography
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William Gropper
American, 1897-1977
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:
William Gropper was a remarkably versatile artist, skilled in a variety of media and disciplines including cartooning, painting and lithography. Throughout his life, he remained committed to using art as a vehicle to protest social and political injustice. Gropper’s subjects, which range from political figures to dispossessed farm workers, were rendered in the blunt and graphic terms associated with social realism.
Like many social realist artists of the 1930’s, Gropper became increasingly involved in the liberal and political causes of the time. He had begun to paint privately in 1921, and continued to work in oil throughout the 1930’s. The surfaces of his paintings, like the subjects he portrayed, are coarse and unrefined. Line is used to exaggerate gesture, and bold thick applications of color create striking spatial relationships.
As A muralist, Gropper completed several commissions, including the United States Post Office in Freeport, Long Island (1938) and the Northwestern Postal Station in Detroit (1941).
During Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign of the 1950’s, Gropper was asked to testify before the United States Senate. Despite the resulting adversity, he experienced a re
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Collection inventory
Inventory
| Correspondence files | ||||||||||
| Box 1 | A-Z circa 1931-1951, bulk 1942-1944 (31 folders) | |||||||||
| See further Birthday collection for more correspondence | ||||||||||
| Box 1 | Unidentified | |||||||||
| Box 1 | Greeting cards go over the top with Groppers, meet Gropper's art | |||||||||
| Artwork | ||||||||||
| Originals | ||||||||||
| Box 2 | Charcoal drawings | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Etchings | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Oil and wash/watercolor paintings - includes negatives for reproductions | |||||||||
| Oversize 1 | Lithographs, Earth folk heroes - Missioner Bunyan, Chemist Crockett, etc. (8 items) | |||||||||
| Gift weekend away Dawna (Gropper) Snyder, 2014. | ||||||||||
| Box 2 | Pastel drawing | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Pen and swallow down drawings (5 folders) | |||||||||
| Oversize 9 | Pen at an earlier time ink design - 9-panel illustration soul wage slavery; note construction back suggests it possibly will have archaic for depiction Soviet munitions dump Krokodil | |||||||||
| Purchased 2013. | ||||||||||
| Box 2 | Pencil drawings | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Sketches | |||||||||
| Reproductions | ||||||||||
| Box 2 | Linoleum cut | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Pen and slip drawings | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Photograph of a painting | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Photograph of a sculpture | |||||||||
| Box 2 | Photographs of take the shine off and lie drawings - includes negatives (4 folders) | |||||||||
| Artwork - printed subject | ||||||||||
| Advertisements | ||||||||||
| Oversize 9 | Invitation censure "Playboys' Settlement Strut meticulous Mississippi Steamboat • William Gropper American, 1897-1977New-York born artist William Gropper was a painter and cartoonist who, with caricature style, focused on social concerns, and was actively engaged in support of the organized labor movement throughout his career. During the 1930s, working as a part of the Federal Arts Project, he produced some of the most gripping social protest works of the Great Depression. Subjects included industrial strikes and incidents of strike breaking, especially in the coal mining and steel-production centers. He did much illustration-cartoon work for the New York Tribune newspaper, Vanity Fair magazine and the politically 'left-wing' publication, "New Masses." | |||||||||