GROPPER’S THE OPPOSITION

by Joan K. Yanni

Both William Gropper's The Opposition (51.5) and MAG's new print of the same name were executed by the artist in response to what he considered government censorship.  The works are current enough to appear on editorial pages today, when committees are discussing censorship of web sites and Congress has proposed legislation that would restrict the content of federally funded art programs.

During the early 1940s Gropper, always a crusader for freedom of speech, stated, "the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives have had such an influence on American life, good and bad, that it has even affected the arts and the cultural development of our country.  Only recently one blazing speech of a reactionary representative resulted...dismissing the Graphic Division of the OWI (Office of War Information) and nullifying art reportage for the War Department.  In my painting of the Senate, called Opposition, I have portrayed the type of representative that is opposed to progress and culture."

A staunch member of the social realism movement in American painters, Gropper (1897-1977) was born in New York City's Lower East Side.  His grandparents were immigrants.  His father, a scholarly man with wide interests, could speak eight languages but had trouble holding down a job.  His mother, a seamstress who took piece work home to do at night, supported the family.  Gropper dropped out of high school to take a job working 12 hours a day, six days a week, for $5.  Work in a sweatshop made him an advocate of liberal causes for the rest of his life.

Gropper began to take art courses at night in the Ferrer School under George Bellows and Robert Henri.  He was awarded a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, but failed to compete his course there.  The school was too rigid after the fellowship and freedom of criticism he had found with Bellows and Henri.

 His first job as a political cartoonist came with the New York Herald Tribune.  He continued as cartoonist and illustrated for various magazines through the twenties.

In 1936 he had his first exhibit as a painter, though he had been painting quietly for fifteen years.  His canvasses had many of the same qualities as his prints:  the same distortion, the same exaggeration of figures with iron-hard contours.  He combined a muted palette with stippled textures and a dramatic use of white pigment.  He had a marvelous sense of movement and action.

The Opposition, with its distorted forms and its placement of rude, inattentive, gossipy figures among empty chairs, reveals Gropper's contempt for what he considered to be an ineffective and indifferent bureaucratic system.

Gropper editorialized in paint the social maladies of the 30s and 40s.  Along with many other artists, he was blacklisted by the McCarthy UnAmerican Activities Committee.  Throughout his life he continued to encourage social consciousness and reform. 

The Opposition was among fourteen paintings purchased by the Gallery in 1950 from the Encyclopedia Brittanica collection with the help of former Senator William Benton and the Marion Stratton Gould Fund.  Other paintings in the purchase, which became the core of our early 20th century collection, include Thomas Hart Benton's Boomtown, John Sloan's Chinese Restaurant, George Luks's London Cabby, Stuart Davis's Landscape with Garage Lights, Arthur Dove's Cars in a Sleetstorm, Ralston Crawford's Whitestone Bridge, Georgia O'Keeffe's Jawbone and Fungus, George Grosz' The Wanderer, John Marin's Marin Island - Small Point, Maine, Max Weber's Discover, Walt Kuhn's Clown, Robert Gwathmey's Non-Fiction, and Karl Zerbe's Troupers.

The Opposition

April 1990