ABSTRACT
In 1949 the American Social Realist artist and illustrator William Gropper visited the Soviet Union for six weeks as part of All-Union Society for Cultural Relations (VOKS)-sponsored cultural exchange. Gropper was part of a generation of American artists that was influenced by the ideas of communism in the 1930s and was increasingly marginalised within the US art world in the early years of the Cold War. Prorokov in particular was an exponent of a hybrid artistic method that encapsulated elements of painterly technique and illustration, and whose works share an aesthetic with that of the American Social Realists of the 1930s. Informed by a shared East-West interpretation of art as a politically engaged medium that had developed in the late 1920s and 1930s as a response to widespread intellectual enthusiasm for the ideas of socialism. Gropper and other post-war American Social Realists shared Soviet disdain for the social dislocation of abstract art.
