Coffee Break

Ever a keen observer of human behavior and gesture, William Gropper depicted a man slumped in his seat beside a table during a respite from work, in his etching Coffee Break. Seen from slightly above, the figure stretches across the composition. As he takes his leisure, the man holds a cup of coffee in his right hand; his legs extend to rest atop a nearby piece of furniture. His wrinkled clothing, particularly the ripples across his stomach, conveys an overall rumpled look; his facial features and dark eyebrows give him a quizzical, benign expression. In contrast to the confrontational glare of Top Man (TF 2004.18) and the sinister appearance of Titan (TF 2004.17), this well-fed man is unthreatening.

Gropper often took an experimental approach to etching, a medium to which he returned in the mid-1960s after a four-decades-long hiatus. In the creation of this etching, he improvised by using sandpaper to create rough textures on the plate, which translate into the man's whiskery stubble and other areas of light shading. Subtle tones of light brown soften the areas surrounding the figure. This impression is a first state; the print was later published by Associated American Artists, a New York gallery, in an edition of one hundred.

Sorini, Emiliano. Gropper - Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1998. No. 52, p. 52.