William Gropper was an American cartoonist, painter, lithographer, and muralist.
20 Facts About William Gropper
2.
William Gropper was born to Harry and Jenny William Gropper in New York City, the eldest of six children.
3.
William Gropper's parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, who were both employed in the city's garment industry, living in poverty on New York's Lower East Side.
4.
William Gropper's alienation was accentuated when on March 24,1911, he lost a favorite aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster which resulted from locked doors and non-existent exits in a New York sweatshop.
5.
At age 13, William Gropper took his first art instruction at the radical Ferrer School, where he studied under George Bellows and Robert Henri.
6.
In 1913, William Gropper graduated from public school, earning a medal in art and a scholarship to the National Academy of Design.
7.
The strong-willed William Gropper refused to conform at the academy and was expelled.
8.
William Gropper attempted to attend high school that fall, but finances prevented his attendance and he was forced to seek work to help support his family.
9.
William Gropper worked as an assistant in a clothing store, earning $5 a week.
10.
In 1915, William Gropper showed a portfolio of his work to Frank Parsons, the head of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts.
11.
The work so impressed Parsons that William Gropper was offered a scholarship to the school.
12.
William Gropper continued to work reduced hours for reduced wages in the clothing store while he continued his artistic education.
13.
In 1917, William Gropper was offered a position on the staff of the New York Tribune, where over the next several years he earned a steady income doing drawings for the paper's special Sunday feature articles.
14.
In 1920, William Gropper went to Cuba briefly as an oiler on a United Fruit Company freight boat.
15.
William Gropper left the ship in Cuba and spent some time there observing life and working as a supervisor on a railroad construction detail.
16.
William Gropper was forced to return home sooner than expected owing to the terminal illness of his father.
17.
Shortly after their marriage, the couple spent a year in the Soviet Union, where William Gropper was employed briefly on the staff of the newspaper of the All-Union Communist Party, Pravda.
18.
In 1927, William Gropper went on a tour of Soviet Russia along with the novelists Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
19.
The lobby of the Freeport New York Post Office features two murals by William Gropper installed in 1938 and titled Air Mail and Suburban Post in Winter.
20.
William Gropper died in 1977 from a myocardial infarction at Manhasset, New York, at the age of 79.