I have admired the William Gropper painting in the MAG’s American Art gallery for many years. It is not there anymore. They’ve moved it to the Lockhart Gallery where the curators have built a show around it with works on paper, all from their collection, that can’t stand daily museum light. The lithograph above has the same title, “The Opposition” as the painting but the print is better! More concentrated energy, more dramatic, marvelously 3-dimensional..
Like the great Honoré Daumier who satirized the bourgeoisie and politicians while championing democratic ideals, William Gropper is a social realist. Rockefeller had a social realist mural by Diego Rivera plastered over. We first came across social realist Ben Shahn’s work in Syracuse when we came face to face with his Sacco and Vanzetti mural. He depicts Italian immigrants who were caught up in America’s first Red Scare. (Shahn’s show at the Jewish Museum in New York has just been extended. Philip Guston took it to Nixon.) It is a risky business but their work stands the test of time.
The color lithographs above were based on Gropper’s 1946 “Folklore Map of America,” a celebration of America in the aftermath of victory in World War II. The illustration appeared in Holiday Magazine and was widely circulated in schools and libraries throughout the country. And wouldn’t you know it, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn, who was later Trump’s personal lawyer, found it in State Department libraries abroad and in 1953 he labeled Gropper one of the “fringe supporters and sympathizers” of Communism whose works had infected the State Department. Gropper was pilloried in televised congressional testimony and earned and became one the first artists of the era to be blacklisted. This was the second “Red Scare.” Take a glance at Gropper’s grilling in the Senate hearings.
The war on woke is raging. Books are being banned. The administration must approve the art in the Smithsonian. Mr. “fit-as-a-fiddle” Hegseth has gone on a rampage against “beardos” and “fat generals.” (What about the VP’s facial hair and the Commander and Chief’s gut?) Welcome to the third Red Scare.
Leave a comment