Blacklisted: William Gropper's Capriccios

The Italian language anarchist periodical Cronaca Sovversiva (1903-1919), circulated throughout the Atlantic world and played a vital role in the construction of a transnational social movement across the widespread Italian emigrant labor diaspora. The artistic choices of the newspaper’s primary printmaker, Carlo Abate, were important in creating a revolutionary hagiography that supported the propaganda tactics of the newspaper’s editor, Luigi Galleani. Abate’s wood engravings are involved in larger debates about the presence of the human hand in print-art. In a manner consistent with the artisanal working-class values of Italian anarchists and through the use of lines, shading, and composition, Abate’s visual rhetoric stressed the hand of the artist and thus the labor of production. It provides a noteworthy example of how the transnational circulation of anarchist print culture contributed simultaneously to the formation of a diasporic revolutionary identity and to debates about the role of the artist in an age of mechanical reproduction.

Chapter in 'Communicative Approaches to Politics and Ethics in Europe' (2009) Eds. N. Carpentier, P. Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, R. Kilborn, T. Olsson, H. Nieminen, E. Sundin and K. Nordenstreng. , 2009

2016

Preface and introduction.

Looking at the transition and the development of the radical aesthetic from The Masses to The Liberator magazine, this article hopes to build on a history of American print culture. Not merely by the means of these particular periodicals and their production of the image, but how and by what means these objects (magazines) are influenced by the historical events occurring interior/exterior to the magazine. Asking, what that means for the American art object and its connection to the political and furthermore the future for the political artwork.

2007

Print Quarterly , 2019

Throughout his career, Charles White engaged closely with the ideas, institutions, artists, and intellectuals associated with the radical left, and his prints and drawings circulated widely in the American Marxist press, including the Daily Worker, New Masses, and Masses and Mainstream. These publications stressed the need for politically motivated artists to dedicate themselves to activism as well as art, using print as a medium to educate and inspire the working masses.

2017

Third Text, 2011

In: NO Rhetoric(s): Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art, edited by Sara Alonso Gómez, Isabel Piniella Grillet, Nadia Radwan, and Elena Rosauro, 67–91, 2023