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When I first started trying to make pictures I was particularly interested in using art as an instrument of social change. As far as I was concerned at the time, which was in the mid 30's, aesthetics technique was simply the means that enabled the artist to communicate his message- which as I saw it then was always essentially ?, if not political. As a matter of fact, my original objective an artist was to become a political cartoonist. I was an undergraduate majoring in mathematics at New York University when I started turning out a regular stream of caricatures and satirical sketches for "The Magpie", the campus magazine of humor; but by the time I received my degree I had already become something of a semi-professional cartoonist with a weekly feature in the Baltimore Afro-American, a Negro newspaper of nationwide reputation and circulation.

Actually, it was my search for ways of getting a richer social message into my cartoons which led me to the works of Daumier, Foraian and Kathe Kollwitzm and to the Art Students League and George Gross. Of course the art world was very deeply involved with social consciousness in those days and I was aware of Rivera, Orozeo, Seguerios, as well as Benton, Curry and Wood, all of whom were at the height of their popularity. But somehow what impressed, engaged, and challenged me most were the corrosive line drawings and the watercolors of Groaz.

It was during my period with Groasz, under whom I began studying several months after graduating from New York University, that I began t regard myself as a painter, rather than a cartoonist. What Groaz had done with post World War 1 Germany, made me realize