William Gropper and "Freiheit": A study of his political cartoons, 1924--1935.
Item
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Title
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William Gropper and "Freiheit": A study of his political cartoons, 1924--1935.
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Identifier
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AAI9959214
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identifier
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9959214
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Creator
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Phagan, Patricia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rose-Carol Washton Long
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Political Science, General | Biography | History, United States
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Abstract
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The author examines a selection among the thousands of political cartoons William Gropper drew for the New York Yiddish newspaper Freiheit (Freedom), later known as Morgen Freiheit (Morning Freedom), during the first eleven years of his career on the paper, from late 1924 when he became full-time to mid-1935 when he began his painting career in earnest. An organ of the radical Jewish left, Freiheit (1922--1988) promoted Yiddish culture, or Yiddishkeit, and supported most official Communist positions during these years. While the author focuses on these years in Freiheit, she also looks at earlier drawings and cartoons by Gropper, beginning in 1917, that led, in part, to the development of his cartoons for the paper.;This is the first art historical study of Gropper's cartoons in Freiheit. It contributes to the literature on Gropper and American political art of the 1920s and 1930s through investigating a neglected but major source of Gropper's cartoons, analyzing selected works according to leftist ideological concerns, studying the drawings in the context of radical cartoon styles, and uncovering the importance of Freiheit for his most noted painting, The Senate.;The dissertation is divided into two parts. Part One examines the artist's early life, including his childhood in the Lower East Side of New York, the effect of the tradition of social consciousness among the Jewish immigrants there, the lasting effects on Gropper of Robert Henri's teachings at the Ferrer Center, and the evolution of humanistic themes and related cartoon styles in his student drawings. This part provides the first overviews of his cartoons in the New York Tribune, the Labor Defender and Rebel Worker, Revolutionary Age, New Yorker Volkszeitung, and Advance.;Part Two chronicles the history of Freiheit and examines three major categories of ideologically-driven cartoons Gropper drew for the paper---the capitalist, the antiradical Jewish socialist, and cartoons against fascism. Indeed, Gropper's cartoons of Mussolini, Pilsudski, Hitler, Japan, and American "fascists" are a major contribution to antifascist art. This part concludes with the author citing a new source for Gropper's painting, The Senate, of 1935, in drawings made for Freiheit a year earlier. She ends this study by discussing the importance of the war-driven capitalist for radical ideology at the time.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
