Ralph Fasanella

Ralph Fasanella's America, a traveling exhibition to the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY; The New-York Historical Society, New York, NY;  The Mennello Museum of American Folk Art, Orlando, FL, and the Ellis Island National Historical Park, New York, NY, April 2001 - September 2003. (New York City was included in the first two venues, Cooperstown and the New-York Historical Society.)

Wisconsin Collects, Milwaukee Art Museum, September 11 - November 1, 1987

Urban Visions, a year-long traveling exhibition to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; the New York State Historical Association, Albany, NY; the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA; the Tampa Museum, Tampa, FL, and the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University,  University Park, PA, September 11, 1985 - October 5, 1986

Coe Kerr Gallery, New York

Patrick Watson, Fasanella's City, Knopf, New York, 1973, pp.55 - 62

Paul D'Ambrosio, Ralph Fasanella's America, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York, 2001, pp. 81-82, ill. pp. 80-81

The present owner was a personal friend of the artist's, and has owned the painting since its creation. According to tradition, Fasanella took 18 months to paint this work, which he considered to be his masterpiece, and he sang the whole time he was painting it.

Paul D'Ambrosio, author of the recent biography Ralph Fasanella's America, and an expert on the artist's life and works, considers New York City "one of the two best paintings of New York ever done." It was reproduced on the cover of a 1977 Aaron Copeland recording; used as the poster image for a New-York Historical Society exhibition, and featured on the cover of a 1985 traveling exhibition catalogue. The canvas verso has old labels from the Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.Ralph Fasanella was a self-taught artist who created a large body of work depicting labor history, American politics, and urban working class life. With no formal training of any kind, his works bear a visceral and direct relationship to the colorful, vibrant culture of the streets, tenements and sweatshops he knew in his daily life.
Fasanella was born in 1914 to Italian immigrants in New York City's Greenwich Village, the third of six children. The most formative influences on his life were his  father, an ice deliveryman, and his socially-conscious mother, who worked in the garment industry as a buttonmaker. Together they introduced him to the physical rigors of their working class life, the struggle for survival and decent working conditions, and the value of self-education. Fasanella's political beliefs were radicalized by the Great Depression, and he became active in antifascist and trade unionist causes. His zeal lead him to volunteer for duty in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting fascism in Spain, where he served from 1937 to 1938. Upon his return to New York City, he became a union organizer.
In 1944, disillusioned by the labor movement, Fasanella started to draw. The result was an immediate outpouring of creative energy; he left organizing and began to paint obsessively full time, capturing the vibrant moods of the city and the tumult of American politics. He briefly received some critical notice for his work, and befriended such artists as Robert Gwathmey and Ad Reinhardt. In 1950 he married Eva Lazorek, a schoolteacher who supported the couple through more than two decades of artistic obscurity and blacklisting by the FBI. In 1972 Fasanella was featured in New York magazine, which proclaimed him "the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses," and in an illustrated coffee-table book, Fasanella's City. In this way, his large-scale, intricate paintings of urban life and American politics were introduced to art critics and the public.
In the late 1970s, Fasanella spent two years in Lawrence, Massachusetts, researching the 1912 Bread and Roses strike. The result was a series of eighteen paintings depicting the life of the mill town's diverse immigrant populations and the events of the strike. The Lawrence series represents one of the largest and most significant bodies of historical painting by any American self-taught artist. In the 1980s and 1990s, Fasanella largely painted scenes that refined familiar subjects, such as urban neighborhoods, baseball and labor strikes. He died on December 16, 1997.
Biography courtesy of Paul S. D'Ambrosio, Chief Curator, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, N.Y.
Fasanella's paintings can be found in Lewiston/Auburn College; the University of Southern Maine, Lewiston, ME; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA ; Heritage State Park Visitors Center, Lawrence, MA; The O'Leary Library, University of Lowell, Lowell, MA;  New Bedford City Hall, New Bedford, MA; The State Administration Building, Providence, RI; The New York State Historical Association, Fenimore House Museum, Cooperstown, NY; The Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY;  The Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Ellis Island, NY; The American Folk Art Museum, New York City; The Communication Workers of America Headquarters Building, Washington, DC; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; The United States Capital Building, Washington, DC; The Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The Flint Public Library, Flint, MI; Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; The Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; and the Oakland Airport Terminal Building, Oakland, CA.