The Brooklyn Rail

In the first retrospective of William Gropper (1897–1977) to be held in Washington, DC, visitors to Artist of the People at The Phillips Collection are asked to look introspectively at the federal government as a fearmonger and censor of mid-century visual culture. Gropper was the son of Eastern European Jewish emigrees. Although he was also a social realist painter championing interracial unity, he remains best known for his long career as a political cartoonist for leftist, Yiddish, and—occasionally—mainstream press outlets, where he served as an early whistleblower cautioning Americans about the dangers of Hitler’s antisemitism. Artist of the People, organized by Chief Curator Elsa Smithgall, draws predominantly on the discerning collection of Gropper’s second cousin, Harvey Ross, and Ross’s late wife Harvey-Ann, and gravitates around the communist-baiting efforts of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and Senator Joseph McCarthy, which devastated the artist’s career in 1953. That the exhibition opened three weeks before the 2024 presidential election is no coincidence, especially since Ross most recently lent many of these works to the Queens Museum in 2016, another contentious presidential election year. The Phillip Collection’s presentation is thus a solemn reminder of the obduracy of white supremacy and domestic fascism, as much a threat to our own world as to Gropper’s.

Hung across two galleries, the first gathers the artist’s original drawings of political cartoons responding to the rise of the Axis powers and the United States’ late entry into World War II. Not every cartoon has aged well. Gropper’s caricatures of Emperor Hirohito employ flagrant racial stereotypes, which overshadow any critical bite. Yet, among those that resonate today is The Murderers Spill Our Blood (1943), a blunt visualization of the inhumanity of the Lidice massacre, near Prague, which the Office of War Information rejected on account of its graphic—seemingly too unbelievable—portrayal of Nazi atrocity. Here it is paired with the artist’s statement, newly translated from Yiddish, underscoring Gropper’s humanist position.

Addressing how his compassion for all those suffering from racial terror informed his work, the artist once remarked: “I have to face things in the most brutal way that I can and let it out and then I feel better.” Hung near the doorway to the second room, We’re Just Crazy About Fascism (c. 1940), an acerbic condemnation of prominent Americans in media, politics, and culture who sympathized with National Socialism, exemplifies this expressive release. Led by Ezra Pound with a Mein Kampf-cum-songbook in hand, Gropper’s fascists, with abysses for mouths and fangs for teeth, vituperatively howl. In the upper-left corner of the cartoon, Gropper emblazes his image of cruelty by spattering ink through a lace stencil, dissonantly imprinting the page with the daintiness of the fabric.

The second gallery includes the artist’s preparatory paintings for murals—several of which he produced for the New Deal—and his original drawings addressing homegrown varieties of terror: self-absorbed and racist Southern senators; the House Un-American Activities Committee’s prioritization of red-baiting over identifying fascist threat; racial terror lynchings under Jim Crow; demagoguery in popular culture; anti-labor and anti-New Deal capitalists; the Silver Shirts; and the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few. A fourteen-foot-tall painting of the mythical hero Paul Bunyan looms large. Painted in 1945 as the American Communist Party’s slogan “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism” was losing credibility, Bunyan’s comical scale and corporeal disproportions forebode the failure of patriotic figures to tacitly encode leftist radicalism. Indeed, Gropper was subpoenaed by McCarthy for an allegedly subversive illustrated map of American folklore and democratic virtues, which the United States Information Services circulated abroad in the postwar period.

At times, the exhibition’s interpretation belabors Gropper’s contemporary relevance at the risk of presentism. Visitors are asked to compare the artist’s call for a living wage for labor in the late 1940s to current minimum wages, or consider how his art could bridge stark partisanship. His vision for interracial unity is taken at face value when too often white and ethnic white leftists tokenized Black male bodies and marginalized Black women’s voices. Regrettably, Gropper’s drawings are mostly divorced from the media in which his cartoons originally circulated, and hence devoid of the radical texts in English and Yiddish that first complemented them.

The contemporary political reverberations of Gropper’s work are already conspicuous. What is harder to see is how the artist’s stippled marks are instructive for mounting a political fight while fending off depletion. Devoted to using images to expose injustices for more than four decades, Gropper preserved his sharp wit and his sense of material wonder across these exhibited examples, representative of the thousands of cartoons he drew on deadline. The exhibition particularly stresses how his Goya-inspired print portfolio The Capriccios (1953–57) captures his experimental drive. Produced in the fallout of the artist’s questioning by McCarthy and subsequent blacklisting, Gropper’s magnum opus is unfettered by the constraints of the political cartoon. In Blacklist, for example, he drags tusche across the lithographic stone ensnaring the limbs of McCarthy’s victims, whose very materiality resist erasure by this gnarled path of ink.

Gropper no doubt found nourishment in the joys of mark making. We owe his work more than our fleeting attention each time American fascism succeeds in rearing its ugly head in electoral politics. If we stay with Gropper’s indefatigable marks, we might learn something vital about our own endurance for political resistance.