The 'Other' Capriccios Prints by William Gropper

Just to scare the crap out of you, you must witness something weird and wonderful in William Gropper's 'Capriccios' print series. Talk about some compositions that can fill a child's dreams with nightmares..... Gropper's prints have some extremely creepy scary creatures. The prints are filled with maniacal faces, bared teeth and ghoulish eyes. These 'things' swoop in from the stealth of night and are eager to devour something (we hope it isn't us). I, for one, am both mesmerized by these creatures' appearance, and reviled by their ability to easily entice us to join them to a journey to the netherworld. They are fiendish, evil and you can't look away from them.

Gropper's works have an uncomfortableness about them. No sense of groundedness. Floating figures within wind-swept environments. No place to rest from the craziness that surrounds us. The artist knows how to keep us off-kilter. We can't find a quiet place to sleep, or hide from these 'things'. Night of the Living Dead is an apt description for some of this, but Gropper's roots for this series are found further back in time. A place called Spain, in the late 1700s, emanating from the critical vision of an artist we know as Francisco de Goya. There was another Caprichos series, one highly critical of the social strata of the day, and the social folly of the ruling class. Goya was scathing in his series and left no stone unturned that didn't deserve it. Those prints are exceptionally great and we can derive a better understanding of our own current political craziness if we but look at those prints and compare them to events in our own time. But I digress....

Gropper's compositions are chaotic, and uncomfortable. His lines are a bit lyrical, but also clipped and chopped up. I am reminded of some similiarities to the linear qualities of Willem DeKooning's paintings and drawings.

In this capriccios series, there are depictions of the working class. The endless toil and struggle of work that never ends. There are also apocalyptic scenes of ghouls and skeletal figures ready to sweep in to take a soul or two with them to wherever they came from. They are the undead, and we are their prey.

Other images of horses and piles of the dead remind us of works by Picasso during his Guernica period, but Gropper's work is more bleak. These legacies, and Gropper's interest in the work of Daumier, are evident in his prints.

I will share with you Gropper's biography so you can know more his motivations for this richly dark series. Enjoy my friends....

William Victor "Bill" Gropper (1897 – 1977) was an American artist, best known for his radical political work. He was born in New York City, to Jewish immigrant parents from Romania and the Ukraine. While Gropper’s father was a university-educated man fluent in several languages, he was unable to find employment. The result was that his parents worked in abject poverty in the city's garment industry on the Lower East Side.

Gropper’s artistic beginnings came from his chalk drawings on the sidewalks in front of his home. At age 13, he studied art at the Ferrer School, under notable artists George Bellows and Robert Henri. When he graduated from public school, he earned a medal in art, and a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. A couple of years later he was offered a scholarship to the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now the Parsons School of Art).

In 1917, Gropper was offered a position on the staff of the New York Tribune, where he earned a steady income creating drawings for the paper's Sunday feature articles. Gropper also contributed his work to a revolutionary socialist weekly called The Revolutionary Age, as well as to The Rebel Worker, a magazine of the Industrial Workers of the World.

In August 1921, Gropper married Gladys Oaks, but the marriage was short-lived.
Three years later he married Sophie Frankle. Together, they built a house and raised their family in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The couple spent a year in the Soviet Union, where Gropper was employed on the staff of the newspaper of the All-Union Communist Party, Pravda.

Back in the states, Gropper also worked on mural projects for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
During the second half of the 1930s, Gropper dedicated his art to the efforts to raise popular opposition to fascism in Europe. Due to his involvement with radical politics in the 1920s and 1930s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, chair of the Committee on Government Operations, subpoenaed Gropper to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in May 1953. Invoking the Fifth Amendment, Gropper refused to answer any questions and was subsequently blacklisted. This experience inspired him to create a series of prints entitled the Capriccios.

Writing on his Capriccios series, Gropper said, “‘The right to life, liberty or pursuit of happiness’ are mere words without meaning when mouthed by corrupt politicians, the State Dept., intellectual [sic] or artists who stand by in silence while bigotry is at work”.

Although he faced opposition to his work following the McCarthy hearings, Gropper’s Capriccios series presented a specific response to McCarthy’s committee, which struck an accord with the underprivileged public and enraged the corrupt politicians. Gropper’s Capriccios expressed his disdain for the American ideological culture of the 1950s.
Nixon’s Watergate scandal in 1973 sparked the artist’s last political series in his long struggle against political corruption.
Gropper died at the age of 79 in Manhasset, New York.

Honors and Awards:
Instructor at American Art School, New York, NY
Founder of Artists Equity Association
Los Angeles County Museum Purchase Prize
National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician
Young Israel Prize

Exhibitions:
Galerie Benezit, Paris, France
La Galerie del Frente Nacional des Artes, Mexico City, Mexico
Judah L. Magnus Museum, Berkeley, California
Piccadilly Gallery, London, England

The Expressive Jaroslav Vodrazka - from the Czech Republic

I recently came across this artist's work while on a search for eastern European printmakers, and I felt compelled to share this artist's story and his work....  



Czech artist Jaroslav Vodrazka lived during several chaotic upheavals in eastern Europe in the 20th c. He was born in Prague in 1894 during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Surviving the period of peace between the two World Wars was short-lived, however, once the Nazis invaded and occupied Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Further, their endurance of the Soviet forces which separated the eastern block countries from the west placed an enormous hardship upon countless artists and creative individuals. Those artists that didn't lose their minds or limbs from military service, or lost their creative inspiration from years of oppression, dug in their heels and entrenched themselves for the duration; finding precious small pockets of time to produce their artwork, usually in secret or on the side from their other 'government-sanctioned' art.

1. Attached to the tree trunk, there is a slip of paper with the numbers: 21. VIII.1968 ( the date of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.)

The early part of the 20th c. saw numerous eastern European artists working under these terrible conditions. They were often called 'internal emigrees', and during the day while at their jobs, they did what they were told. They also fought an artistic 'war' of their own while they struggled to keep creative and produce artwork in virtual seclusion. The penalties for intelligence and enlightened minds was severe and swift. You see, the Nazis were not known for their sympathies for visionary artists or any non-ultra realistic imagery.

Religious themes, like Christ's portrait above,  were important to Vodrazka. The artist kept a painting of St. Vaclav, the Czech national patron saint, in his own personal library with other examples of inspiration, like a collection of printmakers Rembrandt, Durer and
Schongauer.  Vodrazka's survivning sketchbooks are full of proposals for never-realized projects about stained glass windows and church sanctuaries. 

 

Vodrazka was the son of a miller who married a baker’s daughter. Their family ran a bakery in Prague. The young boy showed artistic promise at an early age, drawing on sidewalks and the margins of newspapers. He studied art The School for the Applied Arts, where he studied printmaking. Soon afterward he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, where he sketched and made watercolors, even while serving on the Italian Alpine front. A Czechoslovak state was formed after the war and Vodrazka became a professor of printmaking and graphic arts. In 1923, he went to work with Svaty Martin in Slovakia, where he spent the next 16 years doing book design and typography in the previously suppressed Slovak language,(which occurred during Hungarian rule.)

On the eve of World War II, Vodrazka left his position in Slovakia and returned with his family to Prague, even though it was a Nazi-run Protectorate. While there, he settled into a life of teaching, book illustration, and print-making. He produced wood engravings, linocuts, etchings, engravings, and lithographs, and was always interested in exploring new printmaking techniques, using materials such as plastic and plexiglass.

From 1939 he and his wife, Ella, a writer-poet,and their son, Jaroslav, who became a noted

musician in classical organ and professor of music, lived quietly in a place of refuge on the West Bank of the Vltava River in Prague with a view of the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, an image frequently seen in his etchings.

Vodrázka always remained rooted in figurative art, creating images of peasants, landscapes, and religious scenes. His real passion was for intimate, small-format prints and ex-libris book plates, commissioned by collectors who wanted special subjects, symbols, and scenes incorporated into these miniature graphics.

Unfortunately, Vodrazka did not live long enough to see the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. He died five years before the 1989 Velvet Revolution routed the Communists out of power in his beloved Czechoslovakia. However, the vitality and creative spirit is still evident in these prints discussed today. It is admirable that artists can work under what we western artists consider to be difficult conditions. In truth, it was just their way of life, and Vodrazka was able to teach and produce artwork even in this restricted society. His work has a beauty and depth of emotion as seen in the portraits. His respect for religious subjects is evident, and references to other western artists such as Goya, Rembrandt, Durer and even van Gogh shine through his own lines and compostitions. I was excited to find this artist's work, and hope more people will explore his oeuvre.