Fasanella, Ralph

FASANELLA, RALPH (1914–1997). A 1972 feature article in New York magazine first brought Fasanella, a painter, to the attention of the American art public. A seven-page spread heralded him as a remarkable urban primitive painter, a kind of left-wing Grandma Moses. Fasanella’s instant success was deceptive, for he had been painting every day for nearly thirty years. His public had been friends and associates who knew him as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and a campaigner for the American Labor Party (ALP).

Fasanella’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Bari, Italy. His mother was a left-wing activist and his father an ice man with leftist sympathies. Fasanella’s parents eventually separated, partly because the father was resentful of his wife’s greater intellectual and political involvements. Fasanella spent some time in a boy’s home run by Catholic priests but returned to his mother’s household, where he continued to be greatly influenced by her views.

While always attracted to Left causes, Fasanella never took extreme positions. Appropriate to that temperament, his political hero was radical New Yorker Vito Marcantonio. Fasanella campaigned for Marcantonio, himself ran for office on the ALP ticket, named his son Marcantonio Fasanella, and put Marcantonio’s image into more than one canvas. In the ALP and in his organizing for the UE, Fasanella made extensive use of his Italian working-class ties. During the mid-1940s he decided to dedicate himself to painting. He supported himself with industrial jobs until blacklisted in the McCarthy era and then worked at menial occupations. At the time of his “discovery,” he was working for his brother at a Bronx gas station.

The huge and colorful canvases he worked on were crammed with vivid images, details, vignettes, and even printed messages. Many of his themes were decidedly left wing—homages to the Rosenbergs, evocations of May Day, renderings of UE halls, attacks on McCarthyism. He also did cityscapes and sports scenes in which working-class and ethnic motifs dominated. There were depictions of social tragedies like the Triangle Fire and a whole series celebrating the historic Lawrence strike of 1912. His workers were brave but far from invincible. Often, he showed them as crucified by ignorance and exploitation. This reflected his Catholic background to some degree, but he first thought of using the Christ image in an artistic manner when he read Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. Like the characters in that novel, for a time the young Fasanella had become an ice man, replacing his father in the prescribed social order.

More so than that of any other post–World War II painter, the self-taught Fasanella was almost exclusively dedicated to social and political concerns. It was widely reproduced and featured at fund-raising events for progressive causes. His interests bridged most of the generational and sectarian divisions in the Left, and reproductions of his best-known works frequently adorn the office walls of labor educators and trade union officials.

D’ Ambrosia, Paul. Ralph Fasenella’s America. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum and New York State Historical Association. 2001.

Watson, Patrick. Fasenella’s City: The Paintings of Ralph Fasenella, with the Story of His Life and Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.