Arts and Letters

William Gropper was a hero of the nineteen-thirties. His unique contribution took great courage as well as artistry.

We have had ad nauseam the art out of doctoral theses of what art should be, on whither the modern idea, is the medium the message? is the subject of the painting the painting of it? the dissertations on the flatness of the flat, the premises on the desirability of the artist "saying it like it is" which is to say obtruding no attitudes, and all these theses, prospectuses, and art, both unprecedented and unforeseen, are arrived at within our benign state which, if not a New Jerusalem, is at least a New Sweden.

It was not always so. The climate of the United States not so long ago was one of political repression, and the content of a Gropper was no mere debate between academicians. It was an expression hazardous to himself. It has to be allowed that this puts the matter on some level higher than art symposia.

And we are here talking about it because the art of William Gropper has survived blacklists, subpoenas, and the scrutiny of police agents.

I lost my heart to Gropper first when I saw his cartoon on quota cuts on welfare. Waving newspapers headlined "Relief to be Cut," several striped-pants bankers are showing their delight in a happy dance. I felt infected by their joy and was left with the feeling that I had had a lesson in what satire is about.

Indelible too, is Gropper's drawing, "The Landlord" which I saw in the New Masses. He stands in the tenement like an upended atom bomb demanding his rent from a tiny woman—a sick child lies in bed in the background. Anyone who rejects this as melodrama should never be allowed to see early Chaplin again! I should add that the richness of tonal value and modulative quality in "The Landlord" give the sense that the ultimate has been done.

The painting, "The Senate" of 1935, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, catches the quintessential shabbiness of the American politician. Mark Twain said we have no unredeemably criminal group among us except the United States Congress.

All these things are equipped to survive. It may seem heresy to some that this art grows out of Daumier instead of Cézanne. In the New Sweden heresy is called by other names.

At the time these works were done, I was a young painter living in Boston which is my home town. Though it was renowned as a cradle of liberty I thought Boston a political backwater of the most reactionary sort. So when Paul Sachs of Harvard, who had purchased a Gropper painting, invited him to lunch and a special viewing of the Fogg Museum and invited me to come along I was gratified and mollified.

Later, I went with Gropper to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where he went into ecstasy over the great masterpiece of the Tosa School—the Heiji Monogatori scroll which depicts the burning of the Sanjo Palace. The hundreds of figures are drawn in a blunt, terse calligraphy much like play with a broadsword, much like Gropper's own style.

I am reminded then of one more work by Gropper, a drawing done for Vanity Fair. It is of Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, in the uniform of an admiral, pulling a rickshaw. It must be remembered that at that time Hirohito was not the kindly oceanologist that he is today. Japan was in the grip of militaristic imperialists and Hirohito was descended from the sun!

There were angry representations from the Japanese government (we in the West can't know for some reason how humiliated a figure is the rickshaw runner). Our State Department cravenly sent them apologies which they accepted along with the scrap iron from the Sixth Avenue El which they returned in their own fashion.

William Gropper was a salient figure in my awareness of art and a catalytic political force of our time. I am honored in presenting this tribute.