Ralph Fasanella

About the Artist

Union organizing career

After the Spanish Civil War, Fasanella returned to the United States, where he began organizing labor unions.

Fasanella joined the UE staff in 1940. He organized a Western Electric manufacturing plant in Manhattan, a Sperry Gyroscope factory, and a number of other electrical equipment and machine plants in and around New York City. One of his later paintings shows a union organizing committee meeting being held in a UE hall.

It was during a UE organizing drive in 1940 that Fasanella first began to draw.^[3]

Fasanella married Matilda Weiss in 1943. The short-lived marriage ended in 1944.

Painting career

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.

In 1945, Fasanella persuaded the UE to organize painting classes for its members at a local college. He was one of the first members to sign up for classes.

Fasanella became consumed by art, and left labor union organizing to paint full-time. To pay the bills, he bought a service station and worked there.

Fasanella's painting focused on city life, men and women at work, union meetings, strikes, sit-ins and baseball games. He quickly developed a style which spoke to workers and the poor through the use of familiar details. Fasanella improvised a quasi-surrealist style, depicting interiors and exteriors or past and future simultaneously. He painted canvases as big as 10 feet across because he envisioned his paintings hanging in large union meeting halls.

" 'I always felt embarrassed by the whole thing,' he said, 'but I had to do it.' "^[4]

Fasanella's art was highly improvisational. He never planned out works, and rarely revised them. He said of his 1948 painting May Day, it "just came out of my belly. I never planned it. I don't know how I did it."^[3]

His first solo show was at the ACA Galleries in New York City in 1948. One of his first sales was to choreographer Jerome Robbins.

In 1950, Fasanella married Eva Lazorek, a school teacher. They had a son, Marc, and a daughter, Gina.

Fasanella's opinionated, leftist-oriented artwork caused him to be blacklisted among art dealers and galleries during the McCarthy era. His wife supported him by teaching school.

Fasanella's work, however, remained largely unknown for nearly 30 years. While he was acknowledged within labor and leftist circles, his art remained more of a popular curiosity.

from Wikipedia