William Gropper (1897-1977) American, Signed Original Lithograph. Depicts a cartoonish lawyer having an "animated" debate with an unseen judge while various other courtroom visitors look on. Original signature in the print bottom right. Signed by the artist in colored pencil bottom right. Framed. Prior gallery label on the back along with a small label with attribution and the title: "Lawyer." 

Overall Size: 24 x 20 in. 

Sight Size: 19 x 15 in. 

William Gropper was born in New York City on December 3rd, 1897. His parents were university-educated Jewish immigrants who were both employed in the city’s garment industry, living in poverty on the Lower East Side. This failure of the American economic system to make proper use of his parent’s talents contributed to his radical beliefs and lifelong antipathy toward capitalism. At thirteen he took his first art instruction at the Ferrer School, where he studied under George Bellows and Robert Henri. In 1913 he earned a medal in art and a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. His lack of conformity, however, led to his expulsion, and he went to work as an assistant in a clothing store earning $5 a week to help support his family. In 1915 Gropper showed a portfolio of his work to Frank Parsons, the head of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. The work so impressed Parsons that Gropper was gifted a scholarship to the school. He continued to work reduced hours for reduced wages in the clothing store while he pursued his artistic education, quickly gaining recognition and awards for his work. In 1917 he 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. After the socialist magazine The Masses was banned from the U.S. Mail in 1917, he joined artists like Robert Minor, Maurice Becker, and Lydia Gibson in contributing to its successor, The Liberator. Gropper also contributed his art to The Revolutionary Age, a socialist weekly, as well as to The Rebel Worker, a magazine of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1921 he married Gladys Oaks, a fellow contributor to The Liberator. The marriage proved to be short and turbulent, marked by the couple’s collaboration to produce a book of verse and drawings called Chinese White, published in 1922. Early in 1924 Gladys became involved with another man and the pair decided to separate. He became a fully freelance worker contributing to mainstream magazines such as The Bookman, The Dial, and New Pearson’s Magazine. Late in 1924 he married his second wife, bacteriologist Sophie Frankle, and built a stone house in Croton-on-Hudson where they raised a family. Despite his contributions to a vast array of communist publications, Gropper was never formally a member of the United States Communist Party, and he visited the Soviet Union several times, including a tour with the novelists Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. In 1937 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and installed two murals at the Freeport New York Post Office while participating in the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After World War II he attended the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Poland, and dedicated himself to painting tributes to the Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Due to his involvement with radical politics Gropper was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, but came away even more appreciated than he was before facing the sham interrogation. In 1974, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician, but failing health led him to spend more and more time in hospitals, and he died on January 3rd, 1977 from a myocardial infarction at Manhasset, New York.