Guide to William Gropper Cartoon Collection
Collection Summary
Title: William Gropper Cartoon Collection Call Number: MS 98-6 Size: 3.0 linear feet Acquisition: Purchased from the artist's estate 12/30/81. Processed by: KE, 11/18/97; Reprocessed by: JLY, 1/2002
Literary rights were not granted to Wichita State University. When permission is granted to examine manuscripts, it is not an authorization to publish them. Manuscripts cannot be used for publication without regard for common law literary rights, copyright laws and the laws of libel. It is the responsibility of the researcher and his/her publisher to obtain permission to publish. Scholars and students who eventually plan to have their work published are urged to make inquiry regarding overall restrictions on publication before initial research.
The William Gropper Cartoon Collection contains 288 political cartoons from the World War II era drawn for the Freiheit, a liberal Jewish newspaper. The cartoons have been assigned keyword titles if the original title was unknown. They are listed alphabetically and include an accession number (which may be found on the back of each cartoon near a corner). The cartoons illustrate feelings towards Nazi Germany, America, Japan, China, society, and other issues related to World War II.
As a painter, illustrator, and cartoonist, William Gropper addressed all his art to the causes of the common man, earning him the designation as “the workingman’s protector.” Frequently placed in the same class as Callot, Goya, and Daumier, he was considered to be one of America’s foremost social realist artists. Throughout most of his long career, Mr. Gropper enjoyed both critical and popular regard. In the 1950s, however, after his testimony before the Senator McCarthy hearings, he was blacklisted and his book American Folklore was removed from library shelves. Commissions for work and purchases of his paintings dropped dramatically. During this bleak period, he expressed his bitterness and frustration in a series of lithographs called the “Caprichos.” Fortunately, this dark period did not last long before his art was again in demand. Today Mr. Gropper’s drawings and paintings are on display in collections all over the United States, and in England and Russia.
Often called “the American Daumier,” William Gropper was born on December 3, 1897 in New York City. His father, Harry Gropper, though learned and fluent in eight languages, always had difficulty in holding a job. To support the family, his mother, Jenny Nidel Gropper, a Ukrainian immigrant, worked in a garment factory during the day and did piece work at home at night.
During William Gropper’s formative years, New York was becoming the center of culture as well as the center for dissent and reform in art. In the midst of this movement was the Ferrer School, where Gropper received his first formal art training in 1912. Rejecting the traditional methods of training, the school tried to instill the notions of originality, expanding the horizons of art to capture the emotions of life and the essence of the times. A year later, Gropper was given a scholarship to attend the National Academy of Design. But he preferred the individuality of the Ferrer school and could not conform to the traditional discipline of the N.A.D,. and was there for only a short time. He then went to work as a clerk and general helper at a men’s clothing store. From time to time he lettered signs and addressed postal cards to customers which he decorated with small drawings. One such drawing caught the eye of Frank Alvah Parsons, president of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. He offered Gropper a scholarship. From 1915 to 1918, William Gropper attended the New York School where he earned several awards and a reputation as a comer.
Just as his humorous drawings got William Gropper into the New York School, they also got him his first job as an artist when they came to the attention of Assistant Editor Garrett of The New York Times. In 1919, Gropper went to work at the Times’ Sunday magazine, drawing caricatures and comic sketches. An assignment to cover the activities of the International Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) drew the young artist away from his comfortable job and into the world of social and liberal causes. Soon his drawings began to appear in The Rebel Worker, a small underground paper, The Dial, Village Quill, Pagan, the New Masses, and The Sunday Worker. He started drawing a daily political cartoon for the Freiheit, a liberal Yiddish paper, in 1924. That same year he married Sophie Frankel on October 10. They had two children, Gene and Lee. Before long his cartoons found their way into the more mainstream publications like The New York Post, New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.
By 1921, William Gropper was an established illustrator and newspaper cartoonist. He then turned his efforts to becoming a serious painter. His first one-man show at the Dinghy Gallery in Greenwich Village on February 3, 1936 brought him instant critical and professional recognition. The next year the ACA Gallery in Greenwich put on two Gropper shows. From that time, until 1943, he had annual show at the ACA. After the war, galleries from all over put on Gropper exhibits: the ACA in 1945; the AAA Gallery in 1951; Detroit’s Garelick Gallery, San Francisco’s Galerie de Tours and Los Angeles’ Heritage Gallery in 1956; Mexico City in 1957; Rome in 1964; Israel’s Herzl Institute in 1966; and the Tamarind Lithograph Workshop in California in 1967. Permanent exhibits of his work are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Library of Congress and the Phillips Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.; the Hartford Museum of Connecticut; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Fogg Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the St. Louis Art Museum; New Jersey’s Newark Museum; the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis; the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia; the Los Angeles County Museum; the John Herron Art Institute; the Museum of Western Art in Moscow, Russia; the Encyclopedia British Collection; at the universities of Arizona and Maine, and in the Abbot and Dr. Paul Sach Collections.
Mr. Gropper’s paintings can also be seen outside of the galleries and museums. In 1934 the Schenley Distilleries Corporation of New York commissioned him to paint a mural depicting the various stages of wine making. This was just the first in a series of murals. In the Hotel Taft coffee shop, he covered the wall with paintings with Colonial American themes. Other murals were painted for the Post Office at Freeport, Long Island (a W.P.A. project); the new Department of the Interior Building in Washington, D.C. (a United States Treasury Art Project); and Northwestern Postal Station and Wayne State University of Detroit. He also designed the stained glass windows for the Temple Har Zion in River Forest, Illinois (a Chicago suburb). In addition numerous examples of his cartoons, drawings, lithographs, illustrations, and paintings can be found in several books. He is the author of: The Golden Land, a set of political cartoons, 1927; 56 Drawings of the U.S.S.R., 1928; Alay-Oop, a story in pictures, 1930; Gropper, a collection of art works, 1938; Portfolio of Caucasian Studies, 1950; American Folklore, a book of lithographs, 1953; The Little Tailor, 1954; The Lost Conscience, a book of lithographs, 1955; Caprichos, lithographs, 1957; Portfolio of Twelve Etchings; and The Shtetl, a portfolio of lithographs, 1970. He is the illustrator of: Literary Spotlight by John Farrar, 1924; The Circus Parade by Jim Tully, 1927; My Reminiscences as a Cowboy by Frank Harris, 1930; Whither, Whither by W. S. Hankel, 1930; More Necessary Nonsense by Burges Johnson, 1931; There Ought to Be a Law by William Seagle, 1933; Reading Left to Right by Robert Forsythe, 1938; Bowleg Bill by Jeremiah Digges, 1938; The Illustrious Dunderheads, 1942; Lidice for the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in Washington D.C., 1942; The Crime of Imprisonment by George Bernard Shaw, 1954; Here Comes Daddy by Gale Parks, 1951; and Hound Dog Moses and Promised Land by W. D. Edwards in 1954.
His great body of work has earned him numerous awards. He received a National Academy Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937. The Carnegie jury of 1946 gave him third prize for his painting “Don Quixote.” He won the Collier prize for illustration in 1920, the Harmon prize in 1930, the Young Israel prize in 1931, the Artists for Victory lithograph prize in 1944, the John Herron Art Institute Prize for lithography in 1944, and the Thomas B. Clark Prize National Academy Design in 1973. In 1965 he was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant and became Artist-in-Residence under the American Federation of Art at the Evansville Museum, and was again Artist-in-Residence of the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop at Los Angeles in 1967. Memberships included the Society of American Graphic Artists; Institute of Arts and Letters; Society of Mural Painters; American Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers; The American Group; Artists Equity Association; and the Society of American Etcher, Gravers, Lithographers and Woodcutters, Inc.
| Series 1 | Box 1 - Box 3 | Cartoons. Contains 288 cartoons illustrating life and issues of the World War II era. Arranged numerically by accession number assigned by the Ulrich Museum. |
| Series 2 | Box 4 | Accession Cards. The cards in this series include information about the cartoons including title, description, size, provenance, and other detailed information for each cartoon. |