An artist’s outrage at the injustices of World War II-era America

There’s actually room for just a single mural-size painting in the modestly sized exhibition: a 14-foot-high picture of mythic lumberjack Paul Bunyan as a working-class hero. The vertical picture towers nearly from floor to ceiling in the one of the show’s two galleries that’s big enough to accommodate it. The rest of the documentation of Gropper’s mural making is restricted to small studies for large paintings, including one, “Construction of the Dam,” commissioned for the Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington.

Curated by Elsa Smithgall, the show is heavy on political cartoons, many made during World War II or the years just before it. Hitler makes an appearance, operating a homicidal skull-shaped mechanism, and there are plenty of Nazi-style swastikas. Also included are images of Hirohito, presented with a warning from the Phillips about their stereotypical depiction of a Japanese person. But chief among Gropper’s adversaries were such prominent pro-fascist Americans as Charles Lindbergh, William Randolph Hearst, Ezra Pound and antisemitic radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin. The prominence of these caricatures suggests that the exhibition was keyed, at least in part, to this year’s presidential election.

Born in New York City, Gropper (1897-1977) was the son of Jewish parents from Romania and Ukraine. His outlook was shaped by the struggles of the immigrants and laborers around him, in both his Lower East Side neighborhood and his family. When he was a boy, one of his aunts died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which had the highest human cost of any disaster in the city during the 20th century.

Gropper joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1917 and later contributed to Vanity Fair. The magazine sent him to Washington, a visit that later yielded a portrait of a blustering and slightly cubist “Eternal Senator.” But many of Gropper’s drawings and cartoons were done for such leftist journals as New Masses, Rebel Worker and the Liberator, as well as the Yiddish-language Morning Freiheit.

That last publication was affiliated with the U.S. Communist Party. While Gropper never joined the party, he did spend a year in the Soviet Union in 1924-1925, at the beginning of Stalin’s reign, and briefly worked for Pravda. The artist’s politics were always controversial, which complicated some assignments. Gropper had to work from photographs to paint a heroic vision of workers at a Ford automobile plant for a Detroit post office mural because the car company banned him from its building.