GROPPER
William Gropper
Herman Baron (Introduction)

8.5 x 11 hardcover book with 128 pages with 60 b/w illustrations. Herman Baron founded the ACA Gallery in 1932 (one of the 30 galleries in NYC at the time!). ACA was one of two galleries devoted to showing American art at the time. Its emphasis on art with a message and social realism was uniquely its own.

William Gropper studied with Robert Henri and George Bellows. Over the course of sixty years, he illustrated books (i.e., The Little Tailor, Bowleg Bill, Horseriders in the Old West Shadows of Men, The Crime of Imprisonment), magazines (i.e., Broom, Harper's, Dial, The Daily Worker), Warbond posters, and created art for the United Nations. Here's someone who believed that art could truly make the world a better place.

Gropper attended the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts part-time as a scholarship student from 1915-1917, and on the strength of several prize-winning drawings, was offered a position as a staff artist at the New York Tribune. Soon after he began to contribute drawings to radical journals like Rebel Worker and Voice of Labor, and this ultimately cost him his Tribune position.

By 1920 he was a caricaturist for both radical left and mainstream journals and books. Gropper was always willing to draw for what he believed to be just causes and to champion the disenfranchised or disadvantaged of all races and creeds.

From 1936 he had a yearly solo exhibition of paintings and drawings at the ACA Gallery (American Contemporary Art); in the 1930s and early 1940s he was a successful, well-respected person and artist.

By 1946 and in the 1950s, however, his stance against injustice was considered 'unpatriotic' by influential members of the government, and he encountered increasing difficulty showing his work. Called before the McCarthy Senate Operations subcommittee in May 1953, he refused to 'cooperate' and was branded a 'fifth-amendment communist,' a charge that dogged him for many years.

out of stock