Gropper's background was that of the grinding poverty of New York's lower east side. He left public school at the age of fourteen and went to work. A passerby's encounter with one of his sidewalk chalk-drawings led to the opportunity to enter the Modern School of the Ferrer Society where he studied with Robert Henri and George Bellows from 1912 to 1915; he then work under Howard Giles at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art from to 1918. Gropper is said to have entered the Academy school in 1916, on a scholarship, but, on displaying an inability to conform to a rigid curriculum, to have made an early departure (Freundlich, 13). The only record of Gropper's registration in the Academy school, however, is for the summer session of 1913.
Steady employment as a cartoonist and illustrator began in 1919, when he went to work for the Sunday section of New York Tribune. Gropper's biting, politically charged drawings quickly brought him attention--and frequently, notoriety. Caricatures and illustrations, reflecting his personal, highly liberal political commitment appeared in Revolutionary Age, Frank Harris's Pearson's magazine, Morning Freiheit, Vanity Fair, New Republic, New Masses, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair, among other periodicals, through the 1930s. A trip to the U.S.S.R. in 1927, as a delegate to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, extended to a year-long tour of the country, and resulted in publication of a book of drawings.
Gropper began to work in paint in the early 1920s, although it was early in 1936 before this work was publically introduced by an exhibition held at the Dinghy Gallery, in New York's Greenwich Village. He also participated in the First Artists Congress in 1936, and under the WPA program, executed a mural for the Freeport, New York, post office. His first one-man show to be presented by the ACA Gallery, New York, occurred the following year. ACA remained Gropper's principle representative through early 1960s. Gropper 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. A Guggenheim Fellowship received in 1937 resulted in a group of paintings on the American Dust Bowl, shown in 1938; with paintings by Joe Jones, Philip Evergood, and others, his works on the theme of the New Deal were shown by ACA, that same year.
Murals for the Northwest Postal Station, Detroit, Michigan, and the United States Department of the Interior building, Washington, D. C., were completed in 1939. The latter, Dam Construction, a nine by twenty-nine foot work, related to the building of Boulder Dam, attracted particularly favorable attention.
The nature of Gropper's art, his conspicuous political convictions, his several visits to Russia--the latest in 1950-51, when exhibitions of his work were presented there and in several Eastern Block countries--made Gropper an early target of Senator Joseph McCarthy. His summons to testify before the McCarthy hearings in 1953, and resultant black-listing, began a period of near-ostracization that ended with the end of the decade; shows were held at ACA, and in Detroit, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and London in these years.
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 (Indiana) Museum of Art. Among Gropper's many awards were a prize from the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, International Exhibition in 1946. He began to participate in Academy annual exhibitions in 1940, submitting both paintings and prints; he was awarded the Academy's Clarke Prize in the annual of 1973, and Carnegie Prize in the annual of 1975. He was a member of Artists Equity and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
