Oil
on canvas, 40 by 70 inches. In the
center, a pyramid of newspapers in the form of a giant A rises into the sky
with headlines where one catches the words NIXON and EISENHOWER and YANKS
DEFEAT REDS and FBI RAIDS and REDS and ROSENBERGS EXECUTED AS ATOM SPIES. In the sky, on the left two signs outlined in red blazon
SAVE, and a red cross topped by a blue SAVE floats on the far right, suggesting
another meaning, this one religious, of “SAVE.”
At the lower left mourners follow a coffin or coffins in an open vehicle,
a huge crane lowers two coffins into the ground, and a flowered gravesite bears
over it the words SAVE THE ROSENBERGS. In
the center foreground two eyes stare from wall.
At the lower right uniformed guards guard a grilled gateway in front of what
seems to be one or several courthouses, the Washington Monument, and what may
be the seated Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial, while in the background looms
the dome of the U.S. Capitol. All of which
only begins to convey the cluttered urban complexity and rich panoramic detail
of a work named “McCarthy Press.”
 |
| McCarthy Press, 1958. American Folk Art Museum |
To try to understand this work is like
coping with the symbolic details in a landscape by Pieter Bruegel
the Elder; every detail has intention, if only one can decipher it. (For Bruegel, see post #70, “Me and the Seven
Deadly Sins,” with the Flemish artist’s illustrations of the sins.) The artist of “McCarthy Press” is obviously
very political and of the Left, but no realist, since his canvas is a jumble of
locales and rich in symbols. And no
portraitist either, since his small human figures have only the barest
suggestion of facial features. So are
you confused? But maybe just a bit
intrigued? So was I, when I first
encountered him. Welcome to the art of
Ralph Fasanella.
To understand “McCarthy Press,” one needs
to know something of the mood of the country in the early 1950s, when Dwight D.
Eisenhower was the newly elected President, and Richard Nixon his
Vice-President, in the first Republican administration in some twenty years. Looming large was Senator Joseph McCarthy,
Republican from Wisconsin, who had convinced many Americans that their
government was riddled with Communist spies and sympathizers, opinions echoed
by much of the press at the time. It was
in this atmosphere that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of passing
information about the atomic bomb to Soviet Russia – in those early days of the
Cold War, the worst possible accusation against anyone. Convicted in 1951 after a very controversial
trial, they were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in New York State
on June 19, 1953. Many, including
Fasanella, believed in their innocence, though today it seems likely that
Julius, but not his wife, was guilty.
“McCarthy Press” is Fasanella’s
comment on the Red Scare of the time and the execution of the
Rosenbergs. The giant A formed by the
pyramid of newspapers suggests the atom bomb, and the eyes staring from the
wall imply government surveillance of its citizens.
A personal note: At the time of the Rosenberg execution I was
a student in Lyons, France. At that
remove I couldn’t follow the trial closely and so had no strong opinion about
their guilt or innocence, but some of my French friends, of the Left but not
Communists, were convinced of their innocence and, when news came of their
execution, attended a memorial service by way of protest. Which goes to show that even in provincial
France the Rosenberg trial was followed with interest and provoked controversy. As for McCarthy, whose alcoholism was not yet
known to the public, I had to reassure a German friend that McCarthy was not to
Eisenhower as Hitler had been to President Hindenburg of Germany; he was vastly
relieved to learn that McCarthy was not about to take over the nation.
I discovered Ralph Fasanella recently
when, expecting quilts and purses and weathervanes, I went for the first time
to the American Folk Art Museum opposite Lincoln Center and found the regular
collection closed off, and Fasanella’s
works on display instead – a rare exhibition, some of the works from private
collections, that had come here from the Smithsonian in Washington. By the time I finished looking at his art, I
was hooked in a very special way by this artist whom I had never even heard of before
– no more than several of my friends, quite knowledgeable about American art
but totally unaware of Fasanella. So who
was he?
Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997) was the third
of six children of Italian immigrants living in the Bronx and then in Greenwich Village, his father an iceman
delivering ice to residences, and his mother a worker in a dress shop. Young Fasanella helped his father deliver ice
from his horse-drawn wagon, tough work that involved lugging heavy chunks of
ice on his shoulder from the cart to the house. His mother, an anti-fascist and trade union
activist, instilled in him a strong sense of social justice and political
awareness that would be with him all his life.
After his father, disillusioned with America, abandoned his family and returned to Italy in the
1920s, young Ralph was sent twice to Catholic reform schools for truancy and
running away from home, an experience that reinforced his deep hatred of
authority. Leaving school with only a
sixth-grade education, during the Depression he worked as a garment worker and
truck driver in New York, then for a year served as a volunteer in the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade, fighting for the Spanish republic against the fascist forces
of Francisco Franco.
Returning to the U.S., he worked as a
union organizer in the city, and in 1944, as an exercise to ease the pain of
arthritis in his fingers, took up painting at age 30.
Thus was born a self-taught artist.
So taken with painting was he, that he quit his union work to paint full
time, while operating a filling station on the side to support himself. The outsized canvasses he produced were never
intended for the homes of rich collectors, but for union meeting halls, and
that was where they were exhibited for years to come. This being the time of Abstract
Expressionism, the art world dismissed him as a self-taught primitive – a
Grandma Moses with a leftist twist -- and since it was also the era of
McCarthyism, dealers and galleries blacklisted him because of his known leftist
sympathies.
 |
| Fasanella in 1970. American Folk Art Museum |
Then, in 1972, he appeared on the cover of
New York magazine, which hailed him
as the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses, and suddenly he became
famous nationwide. He was interviewed,
he was written about, he was exhibited, he sold. For a while.
He could stop pumping gas in his filling station, but he insisted he was
still the regular working-class guy he’d always been. “I think the kids are much brighter today,”
he said in a 1973 interview, “but they
also have less experience. They don’t
know what a union is all about, they’ve never worked with their hands. Without knowing what labor’s about a man’s
not worth a damn cent. But a laborer has
to know how to read books. It takes a blending
of the two things to become a full person.”
And Ralph Fasanella was certainly a full person, a reader and artist
with dirty fingernails, a pock-marked face, and a sense of humor who could
bond instantly with workers.
His 5-foot by 10-foot painting “Lawrence
1912: The Great Strike” (1978) was purchased by donations from fifteen unions
and given to Congress, where it hung for years in the Rayburn Office Building
hearing room of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education. But when the 1994 elections brought a new
Republican majority to the House of Representatives, the word “Labor” was
eliminated from the committee’s name, and a Republican staffer had Fasanella’s
painting, the only labor painting in the Capitol, removed from the hearing room
and returned to its owners. In 1995, on
the other hand, his “Subway Riders” (1950) was installed in the Fifth Avenue
and 53rd Street subway station in Manhattan.
Toward the end of his long life his social
and political messages fell out of favor, and with them his art. But with his death in 1997,
his work began to be reappraised yet again, as witnessed by the current exhibit
at the Folk Art Museum, which will run until November 30. I urge all who can to go see it and then
judge for themselves. Personally, I
think his work well worth the effort; it is a revelation to me, a whole new
aspect of the American art scene that I had hardly been aware of – or
appreciative of – until now. Here are a
few of the works exhibited, with my layman’s reaction and commentary. But to really grasp the details that are so
significant, you need to see his paintings full size as displayed at
the museum. If you can enlarge them as presented here, by all means do so.
 |
| Modern Times (1966) Smithsonian American Art Museum |
In “Modern Times” (1966) he contrasts humanistic
values with the cold technological world
of our present and our future. In the
center foreground we see the 1965 visit of Pope Paul VI, who attended a Mass in
Yankee Stadium; perhaps the Pope is presented as representing ethical and spiritual values, but he also symbolizes authority, to which, in all its forms, Fasanella was vehemently opposed. In the lower left, soldiers come home from the war, greeted by the
words WELCOME HOME BOYS; nearby is a stack of flag-draped coffins. But in the center foreground, to the right of
the stadium, war protesters burn their draft cards or are dragged into a police
van. In the center left background a
black helicopter gunship is seen against a red sky, while near it a rocket
amusement ride looms, with a giant baseball bursting from its cone. On the far right, museumgoers garbed in black
and grey visit a museum full of abstract art, and the technological means of
war are displayed. Well-groomed ladies
lunch inside the museum, while a statue outside shows a worker holding up the
world. And these comments barely scratch
the surface of this multilayered, complex work, many of whose details I cannot
decipher.
 |
| Iceman Crucified #4 (1958) Smithsonian American Art Museum |
Less enigmatic is a series of paintings
named “Iceman Crucified” honoring his father, who worked as an iceman
delivering ice to homes in Greenwich Village.
In “Iceman Crucified #4” (1958) the figure of his father dominates, standing against a cross topped by
giant ice tongs (instead of a crown of thorns) and holding a large bucket of ice on his shoulder. At the top of the cross appear the words
“Lest We Forget,” indicating Fasanella’s determination to remember and honor
his origins. On the cross to the right
are a cup of coffee and a cigarette, suggesting a brief respite from work. Also present, I’m told, is an alarm clock set
at 6:50, a reminder of when the iceman had to be at work, though I confess I
have yet to make it out. In the lower
right is an ice cart minus its iceman driver, while in the lower left a
refrigerator is being delivered, marking the end of the iceman profession.
 |
| American Heritage (1974) American Folk Art Museum |
In “American Heritage” (1974) the White House, topped by an outsized white
dove of peace, an American flag, and the word WASHINGTON and “We the People of the United States,” opens up to reveal its interior. Inside are a number of coffins, some of them flag-draped, suggesting, as
Fasanella explained in an interview, the memorable deaths of recent years: the
Kennedys, Malcolm X, civil rights workers in the South, the students at Kent State,
and all who were killed while fighting for an ideal. Standing next to their ironically flag-draped coffins in the center
foreground are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose fate obviously haunted the
artist.
Fasanella wasn’t interested in what
critics said of his art, which was addressed not to them but to working people
and their allies. But of course the
critics had their say. Having at first
dismissed him as a primitive, from 1972 on they began taking him seriously,
praising his bold images and vibrant colors.
His ability to present individual scenes and yet unify them in a single
coherent image was recognized. His
masses of somewhat stiff and static human figures, their features barely
indicated, could be criticized; he rarely did portraits, rarely tried to
individualize his figures. Some critics
have insisted that he expressed nostalgia for a past more imaginary than real,
but others have hotly defended his championing of the struggles of the working
class, his feel for their griefs and joys and hopes – a view that I
personally think justified.
For a closing note, I can’t do better than
quote a memorable saying of Fasanella’s:
Remember
who you are.
Remember
where you came from.
Don’t
forget the past.
Change
the world.
Coming soon: A woman who knew everybody from Eleanor Roosevelt to Mayor Bill O'Dwyer, not to mention Nehru and Alfred Stieglitz, but who kept her distance from Georgia O'Keeffe, and for good reason. Plus other topics cooking on a low flame.
© 2014 Clifford Browder
© 2014 Clifford Browder
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