War Painter

Greenwich Village's American Contemporary Artists Gallery nestles like a hayloft hideaway in the eaves of the Village Barn cabaret. There last week William Cropper, U. S. leftism's No. 1 painter, gave his annual one-man show. A persistent sapper and gnawer at the roots of capitalism (for years the ace cartoonist of the old Liberator, the newer New Masses), Painter Gropper turns out each year some 50 oils, countless lithographs and drawings of fat capitalists, hungry workers, woe-heeled sharecroppers, bashed and bleeding soldiers. His highly-colored, savagely-drawn pictures have drawn praises and commissions from many a bourgeois. (Art-loving capitalists buy his canvases like hot cakes at $750 up.) Today Leftist Gropper (once an errand boy in a clothing store) lives in a nine-room stone house ("bourgeois as hell") in Croton-on-Hudson, drives a big Chrysler car.

This year Bill Gropper, who has never seen the horrors of war, capitalist or otherwise, but likes to depict them, had a real, first-class war to inspire him. Of the show's 25 oils and 19 lithographs, a large number showed concentration camps, corpse-strewn battlefields, bayonetings, bombed civilians, etc. Bill Gropper gets his scenes of carnage partly out of his round head, partly from reading papers. Says he: "I have never seen war, but did Leonardo ever see the Last Supper?"

The Art News, oldest U. S. magazine devoted to art, last week, with a new choir of angels, became a thick bi-weekly instead of a thin weekly, reduced its annual subscription from $7 to $4.50. Among its new backers: International Business Machines President Thomas J. Watson, Marshall Field III, archangel of the New York tabloid PM.

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