Word: gropper
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...downtown Manhattan. He wanted the kind of place where people like himself would not be sneered at by waiters, cigaret and hat-check girls, or bored by a commercial girl show. He called it Café Society, and turned loose some excellent comic artists (among them Peggy Bacon, William Gropper) to plaster its walls with jibes against cafe socialites-who returned the compliment by staying away. Nevertheless, Cafe Society made money. Its clientele was mostly 1) left-wing intellectuals, 2) jazz addicts. For Proprietor Josephson placed the joint's musical policy in the reverential hands of John Henry Hammond...
...this kind of hullabaloo could not obscure the most important fact: quiet, stocky William Gropper, a punch-packing cartoonist, is a still better painter. He paints as he draws, quickly and simply, without benefit of model, in reds, blues, yellows, whites. His masters are Breughel, Goya and Daumier. He does not disgrace them. Typically class-conscious canvases at the A. C. A. show: The Shoemaker, who is mending other men's shoes while barefoot himself; Brenda in a Tantrum, which shows 1939's Glamor Girl No. 1 streaming indignantly through the air; Art Patrons...
...Freiheit, Manhattan's Yiddish Communist paper, Bill Gropper does a daily cartoon, gets paid when the Freiheit can afford it. Without pay he cheerfully draws for the New Masses, the Sunday Worker. He makes his living free-lancing for capitalist publications, from Vogue to FORTUNE, painting murals for bars, hotels, Government buildings. His conservative employers run no risk of embarrassment. "To paint a mural that doesn't fit the place would be like painting swastikas in a synagogue," observes Artist Gropper. "If I were to paint a proletarian scene in a post office, Farley would jump...
...William Gropper was born 42 years ago on Manhattan's lower East Side, on his way to school used to lug to a sweatshop the bundles of piecework sewing his mother did at home. Later he worked in a clothing store at $5 a week, took night art classes till he got his job on the Tribune. In Cropper's phrase he "fired the Tribune" after his I. W. W. conversion, became successively a labor organizer, oiler on a freight boat, itinerant sign painter...
...Bill Gropper married Bacteriologist Sophie Frankle. The two of them built their own nine-room stone house ("bourgeois as hell") at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y. Soon after their marriage they had a year in Russia, where Gropper worked briefly on Pravda (official organ of the Communist Party), learned to call electric lights "Lenin lamps," had a grand time. Gene, their elder boy, was born in Paris on the return trip. To the New Masses went a cartoon by Artist Morris Pass of the proud father wheeling Gene in a baby carriage. Caption: "Made...