"I began to realize that you don't paint with color, you paint with conviction, freedom, love, and heart-aches, with what you have.” – William Gropper
Rhythm in Blues sees fluid panes of colour embraced with the jagged contortions of cubism to form a powerful juxtaposition between the subjects on the canvas. The frenetic lines and vibrant hues amplify the feeling of movement, capturing post-war freedom. And yet there is still a sense of nervous energy and darkness; the musicians wear the ill effects of war on their gaunt faces, the dancer’s bodies oscillate almost as one whilst their animated hands express both a sense of jubilation and pain. The duality of colour and line, and joy and sorrow create a forceful yet poignant image, making Rhythm in Blues one of Gropper’s most important paintings to date.
William Gropper was born in New York City in 1897 to a Jewish working-class family. Gropper’s immigrant parents worked in the sweatshops of the city’s garment district. The hardships experienced by his family instilled a fire in their eldest son during his formative years, fuelling his future political and artistic ambitions: “I’m from the old school, defending the underdog.” (S. Klaidman, “William Gropper, 79, Painter and Radical Cartoonist Dies,” The Washington Post, 9 January 1977).
As a teenager, Gropper studied at the Ferrar Center under the tutelage of George Bellows and Robert Henri. Their approach of “art for life’s sake”, rather than “art for art’s sake” influenced the young man hugely. The artist was awarded a scholarship and continued his practice at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts.
During his early career, Gropper was known primarily as a graphic artist and illustrator working for established publications such as the New York Tribune, Vanity Fair and New York World. He became well known for his depictions of the day-to-day life of the common labourer and the social injustice experienced by those at the bottom of the capitalist food chain. Eventually Gropper’s establishment-attacking caricatures in leftist prints such as New Masses (which the artist founded), The Rebel Worker, Morning Freiheit and The Daily Works gained him political notoriety. The artist was even subpoenaed and blacklisted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, on the grounds that his heavily distributed depiction of socialist-realist America in map form, America, It’s Folklore, was inspired by Communist ideas and served as party propaganda.
The late 1930s were a prolific time for the artist. Gropper had his first exhibition in New York, which The New Yorker magazine reviewed and hailed him as “one of the most accomplished, as well as one of the most significant artists of our generation”. He was commissioned to paint murals for the Freeport, Long Island Post Office and his paintings found their way into the collections of the city’s most recognised institutions, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the second World War, Gropper continued to paint more expressively, utilising important lessons from recent history.
The artist’s mastery of line was likened to those of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier whilst his distorted paintings invited comparisons to those of Francisco de Goya and his former tutor, Bellows. A correlation could also easily be drawn with his contemporaries, Marc Chagall and Chaïm Soutine, with their similar backgrounds, aesthetic endeavours, and contributions to 20th century art. Painted a few years earlier in 1939, Pablo Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes offers, perhaps, the most notable precedent for Gropper’s compositional treatment, in which the positional balance between figures is maintained and the arrangement of fragmented planes and colours are similarly juxtaposed
