Welcome to one fine show, where Observer highlights a recently opened show at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
How about that election? No matter who you were rooting for—and with such low turnout, it’s quite possible you were one of the millions rooting for neither party—you have to admit that none of it was very funny. Politics today has come to take on such melodramatic, high-stakes language that each side portrays itself as the ultimate good, and their opponents the embodiment of evil. Without nuance and specificity, you couldn’t make that classic Simpsons joke that offered a look inside the Democratic National Convention, where banners proclaim, “WE HATE LIFE AND OURSELVES” and “WE CAN’T GOVERN.”
The Phillips Collection recently opened a show that celebrates our formerly funny politics through the work of William Gropper (1897-1977), the political cartoonist, painter and printmaker. “William Gropper: Artist of the People” collects more than forty paintings, cartoons and caricatures, each tackling with incisive wit some of the most complicated issues of the day, with special emphasis on the politically fertile years of 1930-1950.
The immediate reaction to anyone familiar with discourse today will be the poverty of our memes. The person who invented “Dark Brandon” should be locked up and forced to stare at Gropper’s Lincoln Observing Corrupt Politicians, Silver Shirts and the KKK (1940). With its humor and pathos, it’s exemplary of the Gropper oeuvre, the dignified portrayal of Lincoln contrasting with the loony forces of malice, who scamper at his feet as they try to stir up trouble. It showcases his mastery of the pencil, too, as Lincoln almost seems to have been drawn by a different artist, with the weighty shadows of his famous ethics. Dark Brandon looked disgusting and had no broader point beyond its glorification of a politician who, across his many decades in Washington, would often trip over himself in his rush to the wrong side of history.
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Gropper was, of course, ahead of that curve. His Congressional Declaration (1947) sees two fat cats writing over the Declaration of Independence to add after the part about all men being created equal, “except Reds, Negros, Jews, Liberals, foreign-born, trade unionists, artists, New Dealers, government employees, women.” Almost all of those categories are still under attack today by the same forces. You can imagine how radical such sentiments were. He was the first of only two artists to be blacklisted by Senator Joseph Mccarthy.
He supported himself after this with a fifty-print set called The Capriccios (1953-57) —after Francisco de Goya’s series of the same name—which tackled McCarthyism and the ills that surrounded it, much in the way that Goya’s tackled the Inquisition obliquely. Goya is a precursor in many ways. Gropper’s characters feel like they have similar body language. Moreover, like Goya, Gropper seemed to tackle the wrongs of the world on a larger scale, emphasizing the psychological dimensions in his stirring depictions of the Holocaust. Perhaps that’s what makes these political cartoons so good. They’re not really about the promotion of one political party over another; they’re about morality.
“William Gropper: Artist of the People” is on view at The Phillips Collection through January 5, 2025.
