The Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) is pleased to announce the opening of William Gropper: Truth, Beauty, Justice, Humor. This exhibition will be on view in the Lockhart Gallery from July 25, 2025 through February 1, 2026.
Political cartoonist and painter William Gropper (1897–1977) spoke truth to power. While his satiric and piercing wit targeted powerful men in politics and finance, he advocated for the people, saving his admiration and respect for the American worker. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, his biting political cartoons appeared in widely circulated publications such as Vanity Fair and the New York Tribune, as well as in radical journals like New Masses. Featuring paintings, drawings, and prints from MAG’s permanent collection, William Gropper: Truth, Beauty, Justice, Humor highlights what the artist’s critical eye and mind captured over four decades.
Early on, Gropper focused on depicting the foibles of politicians, but by the 1930s, he took aim at the United States Senate. In The Opposition (1942) a work featured in the exhibition, he satirizes legislators as they threaten to significantly cut federal funding for the arts. After covering a national conference on unemployment for Vanity Fair, he declared: “I stayed two or three weeks and painted the Senate as I saw it. I think [it] is the best show in the world. If people saw it, they would know what their government is doing . . . I did one or two Senates, and now I will do [it] only when a Senator makes a speech that makes me mad.”
Another striking work is American Legion Convention. This drawing shows an outsized man in a uniform of the American Legion—a service organization for military veterans—maniacally laughing and nearly flattening a city block without a care for the humans inside the buildings. Gropper produced this work for Morgen Freiheit (Morning Freedom), a Yiddish newspaper based in New York.
Through bold images and sharp wit, William Gropper: Truth, Beauty, Justice, Humor invites visitors to explore Gropper’s unique use of art to confront realities. More information about the exhibition can be found here.