Great Find! A Study for Fasanella's "Dress Shop"

As I have recounted here in an earlier post on this blog, Ralph Fasanella's 1972 painting "Dress Shop" (above) holds a special place of importance to me. Earlier this year I had a startling find that has enhanced our understanding of this great work.

In 1972, Ralph Fasanella became famous when New York Magazine featured him on its cover. I always wondered about the painting at his feet, which looked like a study for "Dress Shop," which I purchased for the Fenimore Art Museum in 1983. Although I first saw this cover image in 1981, I was never able to locate the little painting that looked so much like our large one. 

Earlier this year I received an email from Tom Laemmel in Seattle informing me that he was the owner. He had inherited it from his parents, who had heard about Fasanella in 1972 and went to his first major exhibition that same year. Actually, Laemmel's mother sent his father to the exhibition with orders to buy one of the paintings. Laemmel picked the small study for "Dress Shop" because it would fit in their apartment. 

Laemmel wanted to sell the work, and so of course I bought it for the museum. It shows how Fasanella was thinking about the dress shop where his mother worked in the 1920s. The most interesting aspect about the work is that there is no trace of politics anywhere. Later, when he got into the larger work, Fasanella included quite a few social and political references in the windows of the shop to indicate the workers' awareness of the world around them.

It's always interesting and telling to see what an artist realizes over time, and how great works evolve. Now we have tangible evidence of the making of this masterpiece.

Ralph's Take on Rembrandt

Ralph Fasanella had trouble painting hands. A lot of trained artists do too, so it is not surprising that a union organizer who turned to drawing suddenly at the age of 40 would struggle with hands early in his career. But he did have something that proved better than years of formal training: he believed that he was an artist and that what he was doing - painting the lives of working people - was a calling that deserved his complete attention and all-consuming passion.

And that made him react when anyone suggested that his paintings weren't up to snuff. He said that he was painting "felt space," not real space. His people and the urban settings he placed them in were not realistic in the purest sense of the word, but they sang with spirit and emotion. As Ralph said, "I may paint flat, but I don't think flat."

His most memorable quote, and the one that says the most about him, occurred very early in his artistic career, when someone told him that his hands looked like sticks. He ought to study Rembrandt's hands, they said, in order to get it right.

His response is priceless: "Fuck you and Rembrandt! My name is Ralph!"

Fasanella Found and Reinstalled

If you've been following my previous posts (along with my friend Laura Ruberto's) on the case of the missing Ralph Fasanella painting, "Welcome Home, Boys," owned by the City of Oakland, you'll be pleased to know that the Cultural Arts Office has overseen a reinstallation of the painting to a more public area within the African American Museum and Library of Oakland (AAMLO). The manager of the Cultural Arts Office, Steve Huss, sent me the photos you see on this page.

It looks as if the painting is now in a public reading room that houses other exhibits, which is good. And it's over a mantel, which protects it from any incidental bumping that could cause damage. So I have to admit that the City is taking this matter seriously and is doing what they can to protect and present this great work to the public.

What remains is context. I'm going to write a piece about "Welcome Home, Boys" for the City and Library staff to consider taking into account in their presentation. If there are connections that can be made to the painting's surroundings in AAMLO that would obviously strengthen the experience of seeing the work and would make it a more compelling destination than it was in the Public Library.

One other matter of interest. Mr. Huss noticed that there are two signatures. Both are dated 1953, but in one the artist's name is misspelled "Fasanlla." It was not unusual for Ralph to sign a work more than once, and it was also not unheard of for him, when signing in a hurry (his norm) to drop a letter or two. At first glance, both of these signatures look authentic. I guess we can take this as an emphatic statement of creative ownership that, by all appearances, is once again before the people of Oakland.

Back in the Public Domain

I had a nice phone conversation yesterday with Mr. Steven Huss, Cultural Arts Manager for the City of Oakland. He called to reassure me that the Fasanella painting "Welcome home, Boys" was in good hands at the African american Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO, above), and that the city would redouble their efforts to care for the work as well as ensure public access to it.

Mr. Huss made a couple of points that bear repeating here. First, that the painting was never "lost," but that it had been moved without the Cultural Arts office knowing where it went. He went on to explain that this painting is an anomaly in the City's art collection in that it is the only moveable object they have. (This page will give you some idea of what he means). I can certainly sympathize in that city offices generally do not have the staff, infrastructure, or procedures in place to track objects the way museums do. And museums do lose things from time to time too.

At any rate, the painting is now on everyone's radar screen for the foreseeable future. Mr. Huss promised to move it from the office area it now occupies to a public gallery at AAMLO. He even promised to send me a photograph of the work in its new location for me to post here on the blog. In return, I have donated a copy of my 2001 book "Ralph Fasanella's America" to AAMLO for them to have as a resource for people who come see the painting.

The only question that remains for me is whether "Welcome Home, Boys" fits into the mission and activities of AAMLO, whose stated purpose is to "discover, preserve, interpret and share the historical and cultural experiences of African Americans in California and the West for future generations." AAMLO has a lot of archival material relating to progressive movements and people; perhaps that is a tie-in; "Welcome Home, Boys" includes a diverse group of labor activists and strongly reflects the artist's experience in the more progressive unions to advocate for racial and gender equality. AAMLO also appears to have high-quality exhibition spaces and design. So I'm looking forward to seeing where the Fasanella fits in.


For now, however, I feel satisfied that the painting is safe, the city values it again, and the public will shortly be able to see it. That is, after all, what the public domain is all about.

Hiding in "Plain Sight"

That's how the City of Oakland described the resolution to the case of the missing Fasanella painting outlined in my last post. It was never lost, they said (after dispatching no less than a dozen employees to find out where it was). The painting had, since 2003, been on display at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, in a climate-controlled environment to protect the newly restored work from any further deterioration. The story of the city's reaction to the breaking news of the missing painting appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Bay Citizen (the latter being the Bay area's New York Times bureau). My phone interviews with the various reporters took place in a crowded NYS Thruway rest area while on my way to New York last week, so pardon me if I don't sound coherent :-)

The question of why the Fasanella is in an African American museum is beyond me at the moment, but suffice it to say that when Laura Ruberto went to the museum to see it, it was there just as the city said. Well, almost. The photo Laura took clearly shows the painting is in good shape and even has its informational plaque on the wall next to it for visitors to read. But wait. In the lower right corner there is a stereo player of some sort, and in the lower left a chair. That's because the Fasanella is hanging in a private office rather than a public space.

At least the city did the right thing in protecting the painting and placing it in a safe, climate-controlled area, but that's not the same as having it accessible to the people of the city, which was the spirit of the gift in the early 1990s. Obviously, more discussions with the city will follow, which I will share on these pages.

The Missing Masterpiece

It's not often that there is breaking news in the field of American folk art, but this is huge: a large and important folk painting by Ralph Fasanella given to the people of Oakland twenty years ago cannot be found anywhere.

A week or two ago I casually asked Laura Ruberto, a Facebook friend and colleague who lives in Oakland, if she had ever seen the Fasanella painting "Welcome Home, Boys" at the Oakland Public Library. The work, painted in 1953 and measuring a full six feet in width, had been purchased from a private collection with money from a local union and the public art fund of the city of Oakland in the early 1990s through an initiative called Public Domain. It was originally going to hang in the Oakland Airport, but the Public Library seemed a safer and better location. It was intended to honor the working class citizens of Oakland and the Bay area who fought for a piece of post-World War II prosperity after working for years under a no-strike pledge to help the war effort.

And there (on the blank wall above) it was when I went though Oakland in 1997 and stopped by just to see it. But when Laura went to the library, well, that's when things got fuzzy. The Library recalled sending the work to the Oakland Museum for restoration in 1997. The Museum staff told Laura that it left their premises in 2003, but could not tell her where it went. The Public Arts office did not know its whereabouts, but promised to investigate. Her story of her continued attempts to locate this work through the Library, the Oakland Museum, and the Public Arts office are detailed in her recent blog post, "The Case of the Missing Fasanella Painting." The whole episode is very disturbing.

Hopefully the work is simply tucked away somewhere in storage or hanging in a union hall somewhere in the city. Hopefully. I'll post an update when we know anything further.

My Second Acquisition - 1983

In retrospect, the museum should not have allowed me to get a taste of what it feels like to acquire artwork so early in my career. As I recounted in my last post, my first piece of art acquired for the museum occurred before I was even a staff member. So did the second. Only that one was mural sized and cost a lot of money.

Those of you who know my work as it relates to the great 20th-century folk painter Ralph Fasanella will not be surprised that his work was at the top of my list of must-haves for the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection right from the start (see my previous posts on him). I met Ralph in the fall of 1981, my first semester in graduate school, and saw all of the incredible paintings that he had in his studio.

As I planned my first folk art exhibition here in the summer of 1982, I pressed the issue of a major acquisition. Our Director at the time had just come on board and, I think, was eager to make a statement, so he encouraged me. It didn't hurt that he had been Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program when I started my studies, and so he knew me quite well.

At any rate, imagine that same 23-year old summer intern again, only this time with money to spend. I went back down to Ralph's studio in Westchester County with a different eye. In the end, the work I chose had it all: it was one of Ralph's best urban scenes; it was autobiographical; it was large and colorful; it was New York; and it included his trademark political viewpoints without being overbearing. It was "Dress Shop," oil on canvas, 1972, 45" x 90". After a few months of getting the necessary approvals, we purchased the painting as our first accession of the year 1983.

The painting depicts the garment factory where Ralph's mother worked in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is more conceptual than that. On the right is a neighborhood from the early 1920s, when Ralph was a youth getting up at the crack of dawn to help his father deliver ice. On the right is the Bronx as Ralph knew it from the 1960s. As he  put it: "This painting took fifty years to create."

The price? Hefty for that time, a grand total of $23,500. Our Director got a kick out of saying that the price had him hyperventilating but he did not hesitate to support the purchase. And I felt like a conquering hero. It was only much later that I understood the full complexity of this painting, and the deep personal meaning it held for its maker.

At the lower right Ralph included a plaque dedicating the painting to the memory of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. Just above the sign he has placed his mother and sister working away in the dress shop. The proximity is not coincidental; for Ralph, the union organizer and antifascist, the notion of family was a universal expression of love for a whole people. I think I really got it when Ralph was talking about the painting over the phone with one of our upper-level administrators and said "that one is right from the belly."

Jesus Christ the Iceman

It’s Labor Day weekend, which means my traditional blog post on the great folk painter of the American working class, Ralph Fasanella. I was reminded of this the other day when the American Folk Art Museum in New York posted one of their Fasanella paintings, Iceman Crucified #3, on its Facebook page in honor of what would have been Fasanella’s 96th birthday. Having done a lot of work on this artist, from my dissertation at Boston University to an exhibition and book in 2001 for the Fenimore Art Museum, I feel obligated to elaborate on the meaning of this provocative work.

As we get older, I suspect, we all ruminate to some degree on the sacrifices our parents endured to make our lives possible. Sometimes it is a coming to terms with a complex relationship. Such was the case with Fasanella, who as a young boy was made to work long hours in the pre-dawn darkness of New York City to deliver ice with his father, Joe Fasanella. He was not paid to do so, of course. The resulting tensions between father and son were, unfortunately, one of the defining characteristics of Fasanella’s childhood.

As an adult, however, and with more understanding of the struggles of working people gleaned from his years as a labor organizer, anti-fascist, and artist, Fasanella saw things differently. Inspired by an old proletarian novel, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, he began to see his father as a martyr who gave his health, strength, and sanity to try to provide for his family. The result was a powerful series of paintings focusing on the central image of Jesus Christ in the image of his father as an iceman.

The painting in the American Folk Art Museum is the third of this series, and a crucial part of the evolution of the imagery. Parting from the iconic, frontal, stiff crucifixions in his first two paintings, here Fasanella positions the crucified iceman inside the icebox that defines his world. Importantly, the icebox is being lowered to street level by workmen (including the artist in his blue shirt!) to be replaced by a new Westinghouse refrigerator.

The sense of loss is palpable and overwhelming; not only is the iceman nailed to the cross, but his whole way of life is being left behind. Fasanella actually lost his father twice. Joe left the family when Ralph was young and went back to the town of his birth in Italy. He died just a short time after this painting was done in 1956.

So what we’re seeing here is not only a universal statement about the sacrifices of working people, but also a very personal sense of loss and an attempt to reconcile a mix of emotions. All in the visual language of the masses.

The most poignant passage in this work is the small inscription in the middle of the stickball diamond sketched in chalk on the street below the iceman. It must have been added later, after Fasanella received word of his father’s death in Italy. It reads: “Joe the iceman is dead. No game today.” The artist later recalled, “I cried when I put that in.”

The Incidental Masterpiece

Stopping to smell the roses – or look at art – is not the sort of thing that crosses your mind when you are hurrying through a busy subway station in midtown Manhattan. On my recent trip to New York, however, I couldn’t help making a pilgrimage to one very important and nostalgic spot: the Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street Station, where Ralph Fasanella’s magnificent 1950 painting “Subway Riders” sits encased behind glass.


I know this painting well from years of seeing it up close in Ralph’s studio in Ardsley. He painted it after several years of riding the subway at all hours and sketching people on pieces of newspaper. It summarizes the daily transience of the urban dweller, the temporary moment in every day when one retreats to a zone of solitude in one of the noisiest and most public spaces. The painting “Subway Riders” seems to embody the notion that people of all backgrounds and from all levels of society share these moments. The great paradox of the work is the aloneness of togetherness in the course of a working day.

In 1991, union organizer Ron Carver founded an initiative to bring Fasanella’s art to the public. His organization, called “Public Domain,” actively raised funds to purchase the artworks out of private collections and place them on permanent public view. Not in museums, necessarily, but in spaces frequented by working people. Hence the painting in a subway station, installed there in 1995. “Subway Riders” is actually owned by the American Folk Art Museum, which is right down 53rd Street near 6th Avenue, but on permanent loan to the MTA for display in the station.

Public art is a noble endeavor, but not without its challenges. On my recent visit, I noticed that although untold thousands of people must see this painting every day, very few probably actually look. My informal observation seemed to indicate that they are more interested in the subway map next to the painting case (art should be useful, right?) and in the horizontal shelf in front of the case, where they could put down their cell phone and write down a number or note to themselves. Sometimes I think that it’s better for a painting to be admired by hundreds than ignored by thousands.

But that is a facile and ultimately pointless perspective. Seeing Fasanella’s masterpiece costs nothing (it is outside the turnstiles) and is on view 24 hours a day. Besides, you don’t need to study a painting to take something from it. A thousand sidelong glances places this work in the minds of many, regardless of whether they absorb it in detail. I like to think that in some small way “Subway Riders” gets people to realize that no matter how absorbed in our daily lives, we are all connected.

Martin Luther King: A View from the Gas Station

It was the winter of 1963-64 and Ralph Fasanella was angry. A progressive almost from birth, he had been a textile worker, truck driver, member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, union organizer, and machine shop worker. At present he owned a gas station in the Bronx with two other friends who, like him, could not get a job because of constant harassment by the FBI for their radical backgrounds. Ralph pumped gas for the customers, which allowed him to meet people and share their daily issues, joys, and concerns.

He had also been painting for about 15 years. Large, colorful, detailed works meant for public spaces but confined for now to a small apartment. The works celebrated working-class life and also explored politics and history. Recent events had given the paintings an edge they did not have previously.

It was the combination of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in late 1963 and the nomination of arch-conservative Barry Goldwater in early 1964 to head the Republican Party Presidential ticket that raised the artist’s ire. Worse than that, actually. He felt a coup of sorts had taken place, orchestrated by powerful forces behind the scenes. Reminiscent of the Fascist coups of the 1930s.

He feverishly painted his thoughts and emotions. The work that resulted, a large 45” x 90” canvas entitled “American Tragedy,” is shown here (although we have 9 major Fasanellas in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, this one is privately owned). It shows the ill-fated Kennedy motorcade at the right, and a Goldwater parade at left. In the center is a composite figure – part cowboy, part businessman, and part klansman – representing the sinister forces at work in America. The painting is very dark, very pessimistic. Villains and victims abound.

Except for one.

A detail at the upper left shows the unmistakable figure of Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. Surrounded by death and destruction, yet resolute in his forward-looking stance with throngs of people behind him. A small measure of hope in a hopeless picture. Four years before his own assassination.

Who would have thought in 1964 that one day we would celebrate a national holiday for that tiny figure off to one corner of a major historical painting? This painting has always been, to me, a reminder of the power of right over might, even against all the odds.

It’s amazing what you can learn from a gas station attendant who can handle a paintbrush.

Yankee Stadium and an American Utopia

Another Yankee triumph. The perfect day to reflect on one of my favorite works by the New York City folk artist Ralph Fasanella. This large painting (60” x 60”) entitled “Night Game – Yankee Stadium” was painted in 1981 and was given to the Fenimore Art Museum in 2002 by Maurice Cohen of Detroit.

Fasnella spent a good part of his childhood in the Bronx, not far from Yankee Stadium. His father delivered ice on these streets, and he played sandlot baseball on vacant lots here in the 1920s. He came back to the Bronx in the 1960s, when he and two friends operated a gas station near the stadium.

Most of Fasanella’s paintings celebrate the joys and explore the hardships of working-class life. Working people, he felt, had the best communities and were more connected to people than to their houses or possessions. Life, Ralph often said, was people being together.
“Night Game – Yankee Stadium” is all about people being together. Thousands of them. Men, women, children. All races, all colors. All equal in their shared joy. Baseball as utopian vision.

But all is not well here. On the margins of the painting we see references to the Civil rights movement (at left) and a jail full of black youth. Graffiti, litter, decrepit buildings, abandoned cars. Brick tenements being destroyed in favor of gleaming corporate towers. Fasanella had a utopian vision of all people co-existing in peace, but he was not in denial.

It’s a measure of Ralph’s knowledge of people that the political messages of this painting (think 1981 and the Reagan Administration’s urban policy) don’t hit you in the face and make you walk away. When he worked as a union organizer in the 1940s, Ralph often got frustrated with other organizers who simply handed out leaflets. He would take workers to a ballgame. Politics could wait. People were more important.

This is a timely message for our partisan times. The Yankees, love them or hate them, are back, and making history in a new stadium. And today they have given us a perfect opportunity to set aside our differences for a moment and revel in a tradition that embraces us all like the walls of a great amphitheater.

Ralph Fasanella's Labor of Love

There’s really only one post I would consider doing on my first Labor Day as a folk art blogger. As anyone who knows me will attest, I have a particular fascination with the life and work of Ralph Fasanella, the subject of my dissertation and an exhibition and book back in 2001. His life story is a fitting backdrop to our annual day of relaxation marking the end of summer.


And what a life story it is. Fasanella was born to Italian immigrants on Labor Day in 1914 (okay, this might be off by a day or too but it is too symbolic to ignore) and spent his youth working with his father delivering ice in Lower Manhattan and the Bronx. It was back breaking work, slinging huge blocks of ice over the shoulder with ice tongs and hauling them up tenement stairs. His mother, the real influence on his life, worked in the garment trades and was an active union member. She was also an early antifascist, hosting meetings in their apartment in the 1920s to protest Mussolini long before anyone had even heard of Hitler.


Ralph became a garment worker and truck driver, among other things, and in the late 1930s fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. These were the 3,000 or so Americans who volunteered to travel to Spain clandestinely to fight against the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco. After returning from Spain he became a Union organizer before finally turning to painting in the late 1940s. Over the course of the next 50 years, until his death in 1997, Fasanella created a body of work that celebrated working people, their neighborhoods and communities, protested the injustices done to them throughout American history, and questioned mainstream American values.



His basic message is that we too often forget; we forget where we come from, who sacrificed for us so that we wouldn’t have to, and who and what it is that truly sustains us. One of his great paintings is the one shown above, in the collection of the Fenimore Art Museum. It depicts a labor parade, but not on Labor Day. The occasion for this parade was a far bigger and more important labor holiday prior to World War II: May Day, the International Workers’ Day celebrated each May 1st for decades throughout America and Europe.

In “May Day” (1947, 50” x 80”) Fasanella pays tribute to the heroes of Labor, in the center, a group that includes Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sacco and Vanzetti, and yes, Karl Marx. He also shows the power of collectivity in the masses of works marching across the canvas from the left. To the right he shows the world they are struggling to create; a working-class dream of decent, affordable housing, room for recreation and learning, and the time and capacity to see and appreciate beauty.

On this Labor Day, as the country enjoys a day off from work, Fasanella’s paintings are here to remind us that we should always remember that even in these difficult economic times we enjoy far more than previous generations could wish for. I have no doubt that he would remind us that we owe a debt to those who struggled and suffered to make all that we enjoy possible. A debt that can only be paid through remembrance. If you had the good fortune to visit Fasanella’s studio during his lifetime, you may have noticed that off in a corner, but within plain sight of every painting that he created, sat a pair of ice tongs.