Philip Tipperman was a largely unknown but fascinating painter, born and educated in Brooklyn, and later based in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are excited to present five of his paintings from 1939, all of which have strong labor themes. We first learned of these paintings in 2023, when Milt Tipperman, Philip Tipperman’s son, approached one of our editors to see if we might be interested in writing about the artist and/or the artworks. Kathy M. Newman, our Arts and Media editor, after extensive research, could find little in the historical record to indicate that Tipperman was much recognized or celebrated when he was alive. As a result, Newman assembled Joseph Entin, professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College, with Patricia Hills, professor emerita of American and African American art at Boston University, and the three of them recorded, transcribed, and edited their conversation about these fascinating works. The conversation follows Tipperman’s bio. To see images of these paintings in color, please visit Labor Online at www.lawcha.org/2025/03/01/tipperman.
Philip Tipperman, born in 1916, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who ran a candy store in Brooklyn. Tipperman attended Samuel Tilden High School and graduated from Brooklyn College, receiving his BA in fine arts in 1938. After graduation, Tipperman worked briefly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrating a book on the history of military armor. After that he moved to Washington, DC, where he served as a firefighter for several years before starting a sign business in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Tipperman painted throughout his adult life; he donated paintings to fundraisers, gave paintings to his siblings, and displayed his art in his home. In 1947, he had a one-person show of twenty-two watercolors at the Central Public Library in northwest Washington, DC, that was featured in several local newspapers. In the 1960s, he painted watercolors and produced pen-and-ink drawings depicting people, buildings, and landscapes in Maryland and in Maine and Mexico, where he had vacationed. Tipperman suffered from undiagnosed mental illness and took his own life in April 1969.
Tipperman’s 1939 paintings reflect both the Depression decade in which they were made and the artist’s singular style and perspective. The 1930s was an era of great hardship in the United States, especially for working people, many of whom lost their jobs and their homes and struggled to put food on the table. It was also a period of intense labor activism: The Committee (later Congress) of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, was founded, and millions of workers went on strike across industries and around the country. In addition, the period saw immense creativity in the arts, which took a social turn as many writers, photographers, and painters grappled with the economic and political struggles roiling the decade.
Tipperman’s paintings, which focus squarely on labor organizing, pickets, and violence directed at workers, address vital concerns that many other artists, especially those who moved to the left during the 1930s, were also engaging. In these paintings Tipperman centers everyday working people, using bold, angular shapes. Tipperman’s style fuses social realism and modernist experimentation. In this way, his work seems to be in dialogue with better-known painters from the period, including Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Evergood, and Jacob Lawrence. Tipperman’s lively, colorful, hard-hitting images stand out—even against this turbulent decade’s rich cultural landscape.
In January 2024, Labor Arts and Media Associate Editor Kathy M. Newman, Joseph Entin, and Patricia (Pat) Hills had a conversation about these paintings. Newman, Entin, and Hills worked to contextualize the paintings using their knowledge of the period, combined with close readings. They talked about the paintings in this order: Labor Strike (fig. 1), Labor Unity (fig. 2), Picketed, Beaten, and Jailed (fig. 3), Murdered By the Company (fig. 4), and After Work and Before Supper (fig. 5).
Kathy M. Newman: The first thing I notice when I look at Labor Strike is the color palette: the soft, almost pastel colors, the turquoises, lavenders, and blues. There is a singular use of a vibrant red color above the picketers, shading what almost looks like a marquee, or the backside of a stage set, and above that is an architectural detail that looks like knives or spikes, pointing upward.
Patricia Hills: Well, this might surprise you, but in some ways this painting reminds me of Jacob Lawrence. It’s interesting that the style is not really a realist style. In Tipperman it seems that we learn a lot from the ways in which the bodies are posed rather than from the facial expressions. It reminds me of Jacob Lawrence because Tipperman is interested in form, and so was Lawrence. There’s no real chiaroscuro, that painterly contrast between light and dark, to give you the sense of three-dimensionality. The figures are almost flat, two-dimensional.
Joseph Entin: I agree. There’s a level of abstraction here. Maybe it’s the influence of cubism, because what I’m noticing is the angularity, the flatness, and the sharpness of some of the lines. At the same time, the painting picks up some of the themes of what we might consider social realism—the strike, the mass action—but then uses a modernist aesthetic to do it. We think of the thirties as the decade of realism, the decade of social realism. And certainly it is. But of course, individual artists are always working in a fluid way, drawing on multiple sources. This is an experimental work of art as well as a realist work of art. It’s a work of modernism as well as realism.
Patricia Hills: Jacob Lawrence didn’t like the term social realism! Lawrence preferred the term social expressionism. According to David Shapiro in his book Social Realism: Art as a Weapon, the term social realism wasn’t even used in the 1930s! And there are so many artists who did a kind of social expressionism. There are well-known ones like Thomas Hart Benton, who specialized in twisted forms. And I think Joseph is absolutely correct about the modernism coming in via these twisted forms and exaggerations of the body that you see in German expressionism.
Joseph Entin: I’m interested in the way Tipperman represents the body. In thirties art the body becomes such a critical metaphor—especially for artworks that represent working people and also nonworking people, the unemployed. For these artworks the body becomes an important motif because it’s a way to render the kind of material effects of hardship, things like hunger, starvation, displacement, violence, and injury. And I’m noticing this tendency in Tipperman’s work. Tipperman’s bodies—and they all appear to be male bodies, it should be noted—are large and angular, blocky, twisted, in some cases almost tortured.
Tipperman’s work reminds me a little bit of the artist Hugo Gellert, who was producing a lot of covers for the New Masses. Gellert has these massive, muscular, brawny figures. However, as the critic Walter B. Kalaidjian has argued in Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (1993), such massive, overabundant figures are uncanny references to the absence of working-class power in the face of widespread unemployment and privation. Certainly at the beginning of the Depression, these massive figures might be overcompensating, but they might also have been a way to render the harm and also the kind of hope and power that working people come to have in this decade, as labor militancy, strikes, and organizing rise.
The last thing I want to mention is the contrast between the lone figure in the foreground and the crowd in the background. The background figures are really in the background. We can’t see them very well as individuals. So there’s a tension between the individual figure out front and the mass in the background. This lone figure in the foreground is one of them, wearing one of their buttons, and he’s carrying a sign. He’s one of their number, but very much individualized—perhaps a union leader. Does this lone figure also represent the artist? Is this a reflection of how Tipperman saw himself, as part of, but also apart from, the masses?
Patricia Hills: Speaking of individuality versus the crowd, we also see that going on in the works of Louis Lozowick, the Russian American artist who worked in art deco machinist style. He started painting human figures in the 1930s. He was very much on the left, as one of the editors of the New Masses. When he begins to paint people, we see something of what we’re looking at here, which is that distinction between individuality versus the crowd. Lozowick painted working people, and, gradually, as his work progressed, they took on more and more individuality.
I’d also like to point out that this man’s face seems disconnected from the rest of his body. It’s almost like his body can’t hold him up. His left leg looks like it’s going to collapse. By contrast, when you look at his face, his face is one of determination. I think Joseph’s idea of the collective versus the individual—that was a big issue for Tipperman. A lot of people who did not join the Communist Party, or who were not in that orbit, were focusing on individualism, and that’s what they didn’t like about communism—the pressure they might have felt to give up some of their individuality. But other people embraced the collective, because they believed that struggling together might produce a better world. Struggle, actually, might be a word for us to consider. It’s a word that Jacob Lawrence used over and over again. If there’s no struggle, there’s no humanity; if there’s no struggle, there’s no art. Struggle is the operative term. Struggle is what it means to be human.
Kathy M. Newman: I love that, and I think we see it in this next painting, Labor Unity. Some of the things I notice is that the angular planes of the face look like miniature landscapes. Another visual detail that really strikes me is the kerchief that the front figure is wearing, which looks like it is covered with spiderwebs. He appears to be African American. He is wearing a button that says “CIO,” and the man behind him, who is white, is wearing a button that says “AFL.”
Joseph Entin: We’ve got a scene of collectivity, right? The title is Labor Unity. So it’s suggesting that these two figures have come together, one representing the CIO and the other representing the AFL. But there are also important differences. It’s a scene of tension. This is when the CIO is breaking away from the AFL, emerging out of it and distinguishing itself from it, organizing mass production workers as opposed to craft workers. And then there’s the question of race, of Black and white, and the history of racial tension that’s been mobilized by employers and corporations and capitalists over the years to create tension within labor’s ranks. So in this painting I see an interplay of unity and division, individuality and collectivity.
In terms of the forms, the faces, the angles, the deep shadows and lines—they are all so striking, and they echo the buildings as well as the clouds. It’s almost like the sky is on fire, or is being lit up with lightning, which could be a reference to the potential power of work and workers.
Patricia Hills: One thing I’m noticing is that the Black man is so much larger than the white man behind him. It seems appropriate that the Black worker is the one who is aligned with the CIO, since the CIO had more communist members and organizers, and the Communist Party was fighting for racial equality. The Black worker is looking West, perhaps toward hope? The white worker is looking at us. The white man is inviting us in, and the Black man is showing us the way. One last thing I noticed: The clouds are ominous. They’re not nice, soft, fluffy, bouncy clouds. And there is a kind of a regimentation of the smokestacks in the background.
Kathy M. Newman: Like the picketer in the last painting we looked at, here the buildings can’t quite hold themselves up. They seem to be waving or collapsing or undulating.
Joseph Entin: It is interesting that the human figures here dominate the painting and the landscape. And I think it’s significant that the African American figure is foregrounded. At this particular moment, the late 1930s, to really put a Black man forward seems significant.
Patricia Hills: Certainly, the Black man seems to have the leadership position, which is interesting, because so often white artists will have white people in the front, and Black people behind.
Joseph Entin: There’s a tension here between a realist impulse, a desire to tackle social issues, to confront them, but then, also, there’s something allegorical, I think. This is not a specific strike that’s being represented. Labor Unity is trying to raise in abstract form a larger set of issues about race, about labor, about unity, about the potential trouble brewing in the clouds. It’s a fusing of two dimensions—a realist one and a symbolic one.
Kathy M. Newman: We’ll go to Picketed Beaten next. In contrast to the last two paintings, there are four figures who are on the same plane and are in proportion with each other. It looks like they are in jail—we see the steel bars of a jail cell behind them. The picket sign has words on it now, “On Strike,” and there’s another picket sign tucked underneath someone’s arm. The figure at the far left looks almost like he’s wearing a turban; of course it’s the bandages, they’ve all been beaten and their heads have been bandaged. These men are bleeding, torn and bruised. There’s one odd little detail that jumps out at me. There is a rip in the arm of the clothing on the man who is second from the left. The rip exposes his skin, which is purplish in color. But the rip looks like the head of a paintbrush to me. The painter’s brush is the rip, the tear.
Patricia: We’ve been talking about the collective versus the individual. There’s something quite nice about this picture. And that is, that the clothes all seem to kind of create their individual personality. Their clothes are quite beautiful, the way they flow down, and how the figures are dressed differently. One has a necktie on. The men’s faces are differently colored, but also nonracial. Tipperman has brought these people together, these “people of color.” In his use of color he seems to be gesturing toward categories of race and ethnicity. Alternatively, maybe he is complicating rigid or binary notions of whiteness and Blackness. And then I’m wondering about the figure on the left, is he smoking a cigarette? In fact, the cloud from his cigarette is also the cloud that is in the background, sort of the landscape. It’s almost cheeky or, or humorous.
Joseph Entin: I like your observation, about the rip as a reference to painting. I’m also struck by the range of colors represented in the faces, which again I find really provocative and interesting, as establishing a play on these issues of individuality and collectivity. The faces convey some despair. They’ve suffered some kind of defeat, but they’re also standing shoulder to shoulder, and so there’s some resolve, too, even in this moment of setback. They are in jail! This work is so loaded with tension.
As in the other paintings we have discussed, here there is tension between abstraction and realism, between hope and despair, between individuality and collectivity. I don’t want to overload it with a word like dialectic, but I do feel like these paintings are tension-filled in a way that is really productive, in a way that is really trying to grapple with the place of art in this tremulous social world. How do you represent the contradictions, the challenges, that working people in particular are facing in this decade?
Patricia Hills: I agree, though when you said “tension” I was looking at the one hand we can see, and here instead of it being a clenched fist, the fingers are awkwardly positioned—they look broken. There’s no tension in that hand.
But there’s more tension in their faces, in terms of directionality. Three of them seem to be looking at the same thing, and the last man on the right is looking just below our line of sight. There’s some object offscreen that is captivating them. I am thinking now that the title is a bit odd. We would say a factory is being picketed, and people are being beaten. So what can be both picketed and beaten? Did the strike work? But then again, we know from their gashes and bandages that the men in the painting are the ones who were beaten. So there’s a question about what the title means. Suddenly, as I reflect on the titles of these paintings, they seem increasingly important.
Kathy M. Newman: So I’m going to share the next one, titled Murdered By.
Patricia Hills: This painting is very unusual. In a lot of 1930s art we see policemen beating people. But to have somebody actually murdered, we don’t see that very often as the subject of paintings from this period. Here again we have Tipperman’s interesting use of color in order to indicate race. The murdered man has a purplish-colored face, and I read him as being African American. The Black man is the man that’s been murdered. Also, he’s wearing a necktie. We see that repeatedly in these paintings, that working men have a range of attire, from typical factory wear to something that looks more white collar. What are the other men doing? Are they rescuing him? Where is the rest of his body? We can see one of his legs coming out on the left side of the painting. There is the cuff of his pant leg, and a shoe. Here again we have these interesting rhythms in the human figures too. We have this watery, undulating rhythm that seems to travel up through the figures, through their legs and into their torsos. Tipperman is using light and shade and watery hues to create these flowy, but also substantial, human figures.
Joseph Entin: I love your comment, Pat, about the liquid flow of the human figures, and again there’s some tension for me, between the stasis, the monumentality of the figures—there’s been a murder, the men are bearing the dead body of one of their comrades—and then also that fluidity, and motion. This is a labor scene—we have the factory buildings in the background at the right of the image, and picket signs—but there’s also a reference to the history of lynching. A Black man has been killed, and on the left side of the background there are three large trees with substantial branches, looking like iconic lynching trees. Is this painting bringing together the history of labor struggle with racial terror, with racial violence?
Patricia Hills: That’s a good reading. I’m also noticing that the trees on the left mimic and repeat the smokestacks on the right. I’m wondering if there is a country/industry story because the trees look like they’re engulfed in, or equivalent to, smoke that is billowing from below. There is a field between the trees in the back and the men in the foreground, and it’s being plowed by something we can’t see that is giving off plumes of smoke. Those plumes rise up and blend with or obscure the leaves on the trees.
Kathy M. Newman: For some reason I’m thinking about the style of Grant Wood. Is his work anything like this? He has a lot of fields and furrows, planted rows, fields lined with stately rows of plants and shrubs.
Patricia Hills: Grant Wood does paint rolling hills and fields. But with Grant Wood his painting style is much more sharp, precise, with clean, clear lines. What we’re seeing here in Tipperman is a very unique style, and it’s very compelling.
Kathy M. Newman: This is the third painting we’ve looked at that has picket signs, I think Tipperman understands something about picket signs. Look at how awkwardly the man on the far right is holding a picket sign under one arm, sort of pinning it under his armpit, while also holding his dead comrade with both hands. Picket signs are very awkward. If you are holding a picket sign you can’t properly use your hands for much else.
Joseph Entin: Here’s another thought about the situational dynamics of this painting. It is significant that there’s only one Black figure. There could have been another Black figure helping to carry the Black man who was murdered. It would’ve changed the dynamics. In a typical picture of a lynching we would have a lone Black figure and a large group of white men. In contrast, here there are five white men assisting the Black man. They’re aiding him; he has been victimized by the forces of the factory, by the police, by the state. But there is a weird and disturbing echo between this painting and the kind of lynching scene that might have this same configuration, but in which the white figures would be the agents of murder, not recuperation. I think Tipperman is cutting against the grain in that the white men treat the Black man as a brother, a comrade, and that they are carrying him, honoring him. But in doing this, ironically, there’s the potential to reconstitute the same kind of racial dynamic that might have created a lynching, which is to say a white mob descended on a Black person.
Patricia Hills: I see what you’re saying, and I think this is a more positive image. Maybe today we would look down on this image of white men rescuing a Black man, maybe saying it’s too “woke.” But what you’re saying, Joseph, is that this is the opposite of a lynching. It’s a mob of white men, but they are rescuing, caring for, honoring their fallen Black comrade.
Kathy M. Newman: It’s like they are pallbearers at his funeral. It’s a sign of respect. And also it seems like the tension that Joseph keeps pointing us to, that tension between unity and disunity, white and Black, collectivity and individuality—we have that here again. One more thing that I’m noticing. There’s a brick in the lower right corner of the painting. Was the Black man killed by that brick? Or is the brick used as a weapon by the workers in this battle? Who is throwing bricks at whom?
Another phrase that comes to mind in looking at Tipperman’s work is a phrase that Michael Denning uses in his book The Cultural Front, which is an aesthetic category he calls the “proletarian grotesque.” Denning uses this, in part, as an alternative to the concept of social realism, something we’ve been talking about in relation to these paintings. Tipperman’s figures are grotesque, misshapen, and awkward. How do you depict working-class struggle? One answer is the “proletarian grotesque.”
Patricia Hills: That’s a good observation. You are reminding me, when I first saw the work of Philip Evergood, I thought, that’s the ugliest work I have ever seen. Really ugly. But I had an epiphany. Suddenly all those grotesque figures of Philip Evergood became beautiful to me. Since then I have actually bought a couple of Philip Evergood’s paintings that were at Christie’s because nobody wanted to buy them because they were so ugly. I see them now and I think they are so beautiful.
What is ugly? What is beautiful? When we think of beauty we think of Greco-Roman and Western European art, with all that symmetry and those beautiful bodies, and then here in the 1930s we have these ordinary people who have a beauty about them, but the beauty is not in their faces, or in their bodies; it is on the inside. The beauty is in their intentions, in their humanity.
Kathy M. Newman: This is a great segue into the last painting we’re going to look at. This piece is called After Work.
Joseph Entin: So, this figure is in bed, in his clothes. His tie and collar are slightly undone, and his belt is unbuckled. The belt looks like a snake! His shoes are on the floor but he still has his socks on. He has collapsed into bed. There’s a statement here about the exhaustion of work, the overwhelm, and what is required for workers to recover, and perhaps his lack of leisure time. What kind of time do working people have for themselves? Also, is this a private home? There are two beds in this room. Is this a workingman’s boardinghouse, or something like the YMCA? Also, what is his class status? Like a lot of the working men in Tipperman’s work he’s wearing a tie. His shoes look almost like dress shoes. So he’s a white-collar worker, or petit bourgeoisie. He’s not a construction worker or an auto worker. Something else I’m noticing. There’s a strange way in which the lamp is descending over his head. I think we’re being invited to speculate that he’s dreaming, and to wonder what he is dreaming about.
Patricia Hills: He has his eyes closed. But is his mouth open?
Kathy M. Newman: Yes, his mouth is open, forming a little triangle of openness. This painting reminds me of a series of photographs by elin o’Hara slavick, a contemporary artist. She has a series of photographs of workers with their eyes closed called Workers Dreaming. To make these photographs Slavick approaches various workers and asks them to close their eyes and dream of something, to imagine something. In this painting we’re made to wonder, What is he dreaming about? What is “after work” like for him?
Patricia Hills: I love this painting. I love the details. Look at the little round pull on the shade behind him. We’re up high in this room, we can see the top of a building across the street when we look out the window. And I love the lamp. I have a lamp just like it, and people ask, “Why do you still have that old lamp?” and, well, it’s just a lamp left over the from the 1920s. It’s elegant and graceful.
Kathy M. Newman: I too love the details of the room and the window. Out the window there is a tree barren of leaves. Next to the tree is a telephone pole with wires pulled taut around it. The sidewalks are white. There’s a radiator below the window. The man’s pipe is on the windowsill. The cord of the lamp meanders and twists and curls. Tipperman has put so much care into creating a three-dimensional checkered patterned blanket. But also, the angles of his body are twisted and grotesque. He’s broken. He’s not comfortable or relaxed. His body is tortured and misshapen.
Patricia Hills: Yeah, he looks exhausted. He’s not even in the pose of someone sleeping. He’s just sprawled. He’s passed out.
Joseph Entin: I agree! I’m also noticing that awkwardness in the arm behind his head. It’s like his arm or his hand—it’s like they are broken underneath his massive head. Here again we see the aesthetics of distortion that characterizes so much of Tipperman’s work. And I want to go back to something Pat was saying earlier, which is how this painting is beautiful and also ugly. Was this one of the challenges of the artist who wanted to represent working-class life in the late 1930s? There was an impulse to portray working-class people—people who have been marginalized—to make them beautiful, to put them at the center, to make them large, to make them commanding, to make them graceful. On the other hand, Tipperman might not have wanted to diminish the horror, the pain, the injuries, or the uglinesses that characterized working-class experience in this long industrial era, and still do today.
Patricia Hills: When writing about Philip Evergood, I called this the “poetics of ugliness.”
Joseph Entin: Yeah, that’s perfect. And again, Tipperman in his own very unique way is at once offering us images that are ugly and grotesque, misshapen and distorted, and yet also very beguiling and compelling, with fascinating color choices, really moving and flowing forms, lots that we can consider quite elegant and beautiful.
Patricia Hills: You know, I’m struck by these wonderful nuances and colors. I’m realizing that Tipperman’s colors are colors that women wear in this period. These dark turquoises, teals, and rust colors, the light greens. And here are all of these beautiful colors undulating with the help of this watery style.
Joseph Entin: That’s a terrific observation, given the preponderance of male figures. And even though there is this hulking male body, there is a softness to the color palette, particularly the way the clothes are rendered.
Kathy M. Newman: Maybe what we associate with the feminine comes through via Tipperman’s muted color palette, and through the fluid movement of the clothing. We see that in all five of these paintings. There are no women that we can clearly identify, but perhaps the contrast between the male and female, perhaps that binary, that dialectic, comes through in the softness and the strangeness of Tipperman’s color palette and in his watery, undulating painting style. Pat and Joseph, I thank you for agreeing to be part of this conversation. I love the specific details we have been able to highlight, and the ways we have been able to connect Tipperman to the period, both in terms of labor and politics and in terms of the cultural and artistic movements of the 1930s!
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If you want to see these paintings in person, they are currently on view at the Brooklyn College Library. For more information, visit their website. https://bclibraryart.commons.gc.cuny.edu/?s=tipperman. We are grateful to the Tipperman family for sharing these fascinating works of art!
