TitleSelf-Portrait
Artist
William Gropper
(American, 1897 - 1977)
Datec. 1970
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 22 × 16 in.
Framed: 27 3/4 × 22 × 1 3/4 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "GROPPER".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, January 7, 1980
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of Mrs. Sophie Gropper, accepted as artist's ANA diploma presentation, January 7, 1980
Object number1980.14
Label TextBest known for his biting satirical, politically-charged cartoons, William Gropper first studied art at the Modern School of the Ferrer Society under Robert Henri and George Bellows. Gropper continued his education with Howard Giles at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and briefly at the National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts. In 1919, he began work as a cartoonist for the Sunday section of the New York Tribune.Throughout the 1930s the artist regularly contributed illustrations to a variety of publications such as Revolutionary Age, Vanity Fair, New Republic, New Masses, and Smart Set. These caricatures and illustrations often reflected his personal, highly-liberal political commitment. His long-standing association with leftist causes and his several trips to Russia, the latest in 1950-51, made him an easy target of McCarthyism and his resultant black-listing that ended only in the 1960s.
Gropper was also a prolific painter in oils and carried into his paintings the same essential themes that motivated his illustrations: the oppression of poverty, war, and the capitalist class on the common man. The later years of Gropper's life were marked with many exhibitions in America and abroad; in 1965 he was artist-in-residence at the Evansville Museum of Art, Indiana. Gropper's "dubious" political convictions may explain his late election to the National Academy. In 1974 he was elected Associate member, by which time his health was deteriorating. The artist was pleased to receive the honor of election, but died before submitting his diploma portrait. This self-portrait was a posthumous fulfillment of the A.N.A. requirement, submitted by the artist's widow in 1977.
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