October 10/11, 2020 – Time to enjoy the artist that celebrated the city and its celebrations

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OCTOBER  10-11,  2020
WEEKEND EDITION

179th  Edition

RALPH FASANELLA

OUTSIDER ARTIST IN NEW YORK

NEW YORK CITY, 1957 

Outsider in New York: Ralph Fasanella
Stephen Blank

Judy introduced Ralph Fasanella in an earlier article. This delves a bit deeper into an artist whose subject was our city.

First, what is “Outsider Art”?  Outsider Art is one of many clusters living under the unruly umbrella of Folk Art. The term refers to artists who had no formal training in the arts. Many Outsider Artists began working later in life, after an earlier career. Some, and this is a specific group within the Outsiders, suffered from some form of disability, and some began artistic work in institutions – mental institutions or even prisons. Some were completely cut off not only from the arts world but from society at large, their work discovered only after their death.

MC CARTHY PRESS, 1958

Several very well-known artists had no formal training – for example, Frida Kahlo and Henri Rousseau. (Vincent van Gogh doesn’t quite squeeze into this box because he did attend various classes.) But the term Outsider typically refers to more recent artists. One might think of Grandma Moses as a starting point, but the contemporary story really begins with the effort by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to identify and publicize art he discovered in mental institutions and hospitals after World War II. He called this Art brut, French for “raw art”, works he said that were “created by people outside the professional art world… from their own depths and not from the stereotypes of Classical or fashionable art.” 

THE MC CARTHY’S GREY DAY, 1963

Ralph Fscanella fit awkwardly into all of this. He began painting later in life, initially to exercise his arthritic fingers. He was completely untrained and developed his own very personal style over years of painting. But he was no outsider when it comes to his purpose. Fasanella’s work is very focused on major social issues of his time.

Ralph Fasanella was born to Italian immigrants, in the Bronx in 1914. His father delivered ice from a horse-driven wagon. He saw his father as representative of all working men, beaten down day after day and struggling for survival (though he abandoned the family and returned to Italy in the 1920s.) His mother worked in a neighborhood dress shop, and spent her spare time as an anti-fascist activist. She seems to have instilled in him a strong sense of social justice and political awareness.

FAREWELL COMRADE , END OF COLD WAR 1939-99

Fasanella spent time in reform schools run by the Catholic Church, an experience that instilled a deep dislike for authority and reinforced Fasanella’s hatred for anything which broke people’s spirits. (I suggest Lineup at the Protectory 2 here) He quit school after the sixth grade.

During the Great Depression, Fasanella, then a member of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1227, became strongly aware of the growing economic and social injustice in the U.S., as well as the plight and powerlessness of the working class. During the Spanish Civil War, Fasanella volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and, after the War, returned to the United States and became a union organizer.

In the mid-1940s, Fasanella began to suffer from intense finger pain caused by arthritis. A union co-worker suggested that he take up painting as a way to exercise his fingers and ease the pain. Soon he began to paint full-time. To pay the bills, he bought a service station and worked there. As early as 1947, his work was exhibited alongside the most important social realist painters of the day, including Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn. By the 1970s he had gained national recognition and soon devoted all of his energies to making art. He appeared on the October 30, 1972 cover of New York magazine. The cover depicted him wearing a work shirt and standing in his tiny studio. Accompanying the photo was the headline: “This man pumps gas in the Bronx for a living. He may also be the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses.”

MC CARTHY ERA GARDEN PARTY, 1954

Fasanella developed a reputation for large-scale depictions of New York City’s streets, portraying baseball games, political campaigns, strikes, factories, union halls, and, occasionally, scenes of leisure. In addition to drawing and painting, the artist began his lifelong practice of carrying a sketchbook with him. A tireless advocate for workers’ rights, he created artworks as teaching tools, rallying cries, and memorial documents. He felt so strongly about the need to remember the sacrifices of previous generations that he inscribed the phrase “Lest We Forget” on several of his paintings.

He spent three years in Massachusetts in the mid-1970s living in an $18-a-week room at the YMCA while completing 18 canvases. He produced several very large paintings of New England mill towns, three of which depicted the Lawrence textile strike of 1912. He also produced a painting of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and violent, blood-red image of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

AMERICAN HERITAGE, 1974

By the end of his life, many of the social and economic causes Fasanella fought for were no longer relevant. “It’s over”, he said. “What I wanted to do was to paint great big canvases about the spirit we used to have in the movement and then go around the country showing them in union halls. When I started these paintings I had no idea that when they were all finished there wouldn’t be any union halls in which to show them.”  

Over the course of Fasanella’s fifty-two years as a practicing artist,his work evolved from the anger and radical politics of his youth, through the social and political engagement of the 1960s and ’70s, and into more personal and nostalgic reflections on his childhood. In all of this, his paintings were bound to memory. Fasanella’s imagery is, in a sense, documentation. His paintings are documents of a certain time and place that the artist wanted to keep as part of the cultural consciousness; to tell stories and instruct the masses. The stories he told were ones of political upheaval, as in McCarthy Press; the monotony of a work-a-day life, as in Subway Riders; or relished moments of leisure and play, as in Coney Island. The elaborate geometries within his compositions helped to make sense of his densely arranged canvases and hold together their narrative structure. In creating these artworks, Fasanella was able to remind himself, and others, where they came from—and where they are going.

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EDITORIAL

Stephen Blank has contributed today’s report.  Stephen and his wife Lenore were avid collectors of Outsider Art. Lenore, who passed away was a docent at the American Folk Art Museum.  The museum is open and located across the street from Lincoln Center.  (https://folkartmuseum.org/)
Try a visit and see the fun works of creative persons who expressed their art with many materials.

Judith Berdy

Funding Provided by:
Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Public Purpose Funds
Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD
Text by Judith Berdy
CREDITS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Fasanella

Jerry Saltz, Working Class Hero, Village Voice, June 10, 2002
 
Stephen Blank
RIHS
October 8, 2020Edited by Deborah Dorff
ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C)
 PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS

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