Estimate: $25,000 - $40,000
American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists
Auction: December 3, 2023 at 2 PM ET
Signed ‘GROPPER-’ bottom right, oil on canvas
42 x 52 in. (106.7 x 132.1cm)
Executed in 1973.
The Artist.
The Estate of the Artist.
Private Collection, New York, New York.
Doomsday Rhapsody is an important and engaging late-period painting by William Gropper. Colorful, dramatic, and large in scale, it depicts myriad social and political themes, which, on the one hand were specifically contemporaneous to American life in the first half of the 1970s, and on the other, encapsulate broader, universal themes that shed light on social, economic, and political injustices. Early on, Gropper was a political cartoonist with the New York Tribune, but he was also a contributor to leftist publications Freiheit, Liberator, and Daily Worker. Though he trained with Robert Henri and George Bellows, given the themes in his work, Gropper has fairly been compared to such artists as Honoré Daumier and Otto Dix. In the present painting, the figures nearly burst from the confines of the canvas, as Gropper takes on events such as the Vietnam War and Watergate.