Gwathmey, Robert

GWATHMEY, ROBERT (1903––1988). Robert Gwathmey was a major figurative artist of the 20th century whose long career placed him squarely in the tradition of politically committed visual commentators. He used his art to expose injustice and privilege and was one of the few white artists at the time to portray African Americans with dignity and respect. His vision of Black farmworkers, sharecroppers, and laborers, and women men, and children, marked him as a unique figure in American art history.

Born in Virginia in 1903, an eighth generation Virginian, he took business courses at North Carolina State College before turning to fine arts. He then studied at the Maryland Institute of Art before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, finishing in 1930. For much of his life, he taught at various colleges, including Temple, Carnegie Tech, Cooper Union, and others.

He was also a dedicated social activist who regularly participated in radical actions activities throughout his life. His involvements and associations, many affiliated with or close to the Communist Party, caught the attention of the FBI, which kept him under surveillance for almost thirty years. He had been an official of the leftist Artists Union, had gone on May Day marches, and supported the Spanish Loyalists against Franco’s fascist rebellion. And in 1946, Paul Robeson, one of the government’s prime targets, wrote the Introduction for his one-man show at the ACA Gallery. A key reason for this federal prying was Gwathmey’s lifelong opposition to American racism.

Gwathmey was one of the artists of the American Social Realist tradition of art. This loosely defined movement, which flourished (but hardly ended) between World War I and II, highlighted a preoccupation with real human events and that regularly expressed imagery advocating critical social and political commentary. The artists of that tradition were fundamentally different in style and in personality, but all were united in their commitment to visual social change.

Gwathmey is always included in this category, although he is somewhat less well recognized than such contemporaries as Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, William Gropper, Jacob Lawrence, Raphael Soyer, and his longtime close friend Philip Evergood. Unlike many of his socially conscious contemporaries, who usually addressed the problems of the urban North, he primarily addressed themes from the rural South, especially issues affecting African Americans. That focus was the hallmark of his career.

Gwathmey’s visual style was distinctive. His vivid colors and his angular figures accentuated his images of dignity of African Americas. Depictions of Black women and men in the fields sharecropping, hoeing, singing, mending, playing, selling flowers, laughing, quilting, and engaging in many other daily activities counter the prevalent racist caricatures of African Americans in visual popular culture. Such realistic treatment of black people was itself an enduring political statement.

Some of his paintings also addressed specific topical issues, characteristic of the Social Realist tradition. A dramatic example was his 1945 “Poll Tax Country,” a biting critique of a white Southern demagogue, surrounded by a Klansman, a white clergyman, and an Uncle Tom Black educator, all topped by a conspicuous black crow. At the bottom, in contrast, are toiling Black laborers, subject to the egregious voter suppression mechanism of the Southern poll tax. He also created several other artworks that unsubtly attacked Jim Crow segregation.

Robert Gwathmey never ceased his political activism or his artistic agitation through the later part of his life. Early in the 70s, reflecting his opposition to the Vietnam War, he drew “Peace Marchers” and later “Peace Makers.” He was preeminently an artist of his time, but his artwork’s grandeur and social vision ensure his enduring legacy.

Kammen, Robert. Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Larkin, Oliver. Art and Life in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Shapiro, David, ed. Social Realism: Art as a Weapon. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1973.

Robert Gwathmey. Works, 3 items. Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/robert-gwathmey-1998