William Gropper, Untitled (Study for “The Wine Festival”), ca. 1934

In the 1930s, at a time when most young men had put their lives on hold until they could straighten out their finances, Roy R. Neuberger married, had his first child, and made his first art acquisitions.

In March 1937 the country was deep in depression, but Neuberger, married for five years and employed for eight at Halle & Stieglitz, had accumulated enough savings to feel comfortable about starting to buy art. As he later described his first ventures, he “began buying a little, very cautiously.”

Among the first of these early purchases was a ca. 1934 work by William Gropper. Alternately titled Two Men Pouring Wine, the drawing was a study for Gropper’s first major commission, two murals produced for a private lounge and a bar called the Modern Room at the Schenley Products Company, on West 40th Street. 

Neuberger purchased the study from ACA Galleries, then located at 1269 Madison Avenue. Founded in 1932 by Herman Baron, a Lithuanian immigrant, ACA Gallery was notable not only as one of the few galleries showing contemporary American art, but also as a “social centre where the coffee pot was always ready.”

It was an interesting choice for an early acquisition, but Neuberger said his motivation was straightforward: “I bought the Gropper, an inexpensive piece suitable for a young man with a young family.” At the time, the collector believed that there was “nothing overtly political” about the work, but he later acknowledged that the artist was “a socially conscious painter as prominent for his political activities as for his art.” In fact, Neuberger could not have chosen a more unambiguously political artist. By the time that Neuberger acquired the drawing, Gropper was infamous for having caricatured the emperor of Japan in an August 1935 Vanity Fair cartoon.

This text is an excerpt from the introduction by Tracy Fitzpatrick of the catalogue When Modern was Contemporary, The Roy R. Neuberger Collection, © 2014 Neuberger Museum of Art