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Minorities
William Gropper
1938–1939
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The painter and political cartoonist William Gropper was born in New York City, the son of East European immigrants who worked in the garment industry. A political radical who was sympathetic to communism (but was never a party member), Gropper contributed political cartoons in the interwar years to both radical and liberal newspapers and magazines. He painted in a representational style that employed cubism’s pronounced angularity. In the 1930s, he received government and business commissions for murals. In the wake of the Holocaust, he turned frequently to explicitly Jewish themes.
The sea
tore a rib from its side
and said:
Go! Lie down there, be
a sign that I
am great and mighty.
Go
be a sign.
The canal
lies at my window,
speechless.
What can be sadder
than water
without…
Arnold Böcklin is dead—yet who among you knew that he lived? If I were to tell you that he was the man who knew how, with paintbrush dipped in colors upon a piece of canvas, to shake every heart…
In this photograph shot on a snowy day in New York City, icy bare branches on the staircase of a building dwarf the people and two skyscrapers, creating a composition in which diagonal lines and…