Nude on a Wicker Chair

In his etching Nude on a Wicker Chair William Gropper presents a pert wide-eyed, partly-draped brunette nude female seated in a chair, her legs crossed. The artist outlined her body with a minimum of powerful strokes. He lavished more attention on the angular folds of the drapery and the wicker armchair. He articulated the chair's woven texture in a repeated three-stroke pattern, echoed in the diagonally crossed lines that evoke the mesh structure of the chair back. This print, which was never published in an edition, is a rare example of Gropper graphically exploring a traditional subject of figural art. Although the image is more schematic than realistic or idealized, it succeeds in capturing the essential features of an informally posed model.

Near the end of his career, Gropper returned to etching, a medium in which he had not worked since the early 1920s. This print is one of many he made in collaboration with master printer Emiliano Sorini, whose "ES" mark is embossed in the margin of this impression. In printmaking as in painting and drawing, much of Gropper's work was dedicated to inveighing against social injustice and the oppression of the working class. However, as demonstrated by Nude on a Wicker Chair and another work of 1965, Exotic Dancer (TF 2004.13), the artist was also drawn to the perennial subject of female beauty.

Sorini, Emiliano. Gropper - A Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1998. No. 78 (first version), p. 78.