Thomas Hart Benton

My favorite painter is Thomas Hart Benton.  He’s not the greatest technical painter, nor is he the most innovative.  But I loved his murals and easel paintings of the American Scene, and I never get tired of looking at his art.  Benton’s most famous paintings were in the 1930s and 1940s, and they are informed by a love of America.  When I was in college, I loved his work, and was heavily influenced by his design sense.  He was a New Deal liberal, yet was constantly attacked by leftists for his political views not being radical enough and by conservatives for being too liberal.  I think the only artist who was making murals as good as Benton was Rivera, and this was during a time when the mural was becoming very popular in the artworld.

Benton’s goal with his art was to portray the whole of America, warts and all.  As such, he was attacked by both leftist radicals and conservative Republicans for putting in his art both the good and bad of America.  His art is full of blue collar workers and black sharecroppers, politicians and entertainers, sports figures and janitors.  Benton was not the most technically proficient artist, but his best work had a roughness that conveyed some of the energy and brashness of America.  His work is vital in ways that many other works of more proficient artists lack. 

Picasso and the Influence of Art

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscle? Far, far from it: at the same time, he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s painting of Guernica came at a time when paintings still held some importance to the culture around it. His painting was a protest of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German Lutwaffe planes. Picasso was the greatest artist of the age, and his painting caused a lot of controversy when it was exhibited. It didn’t stop the Nazis or the coming of World War II, but it did show the horror of war to anyone who viewed the painting then and to anyone who views it now.

In Berkeley last year, Botero exhibited 50 paintings and drawings protesting the treatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. It caused quite a bit of controversy and several museums have refused to show it.

I’ve read that paintings no longer have the same ability to influence society that it did in Picasso’s day, that other art forms, like rap, or movies or books, have usurped the role that paintings once had to influence society and inflame controversy. That may be true. When I see Guernica or Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings, though, I still feel a sense of outrage and sadness.

The Founding Fathers and Their Grappling With Slavery

Right now I’m reading Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States and it’s a wonderful book of the contributions and struggles that women, African Americans, Native Americans, workers’ groups and various other marginalized people have made to build up America.  It’s a history that needs to be told, as these stories talk of the struggles of marginalized people to be included in America’s democratic experiment, and Zinn sees a struggle based on an oppressive economic system.  One of the few things where I disagree with Zinn is in his take on the Founding Fathers and their relationship with slavery.  Slavery was a subject that the Founding Fathers struggled with mightily, and their inability to resolve the issue was something that they themselves realized was one of their greatest failures. 

Most of the Founding Fathers were for the abolition of slavery.  John Adams was an outspoken foe of the institution. Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Manumission Society.   Just before he died, Benjamin Franklin forwarded a petition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to Congress in 1790 to force the legislative body to stop the slave trade and work on a plan to abolish slavery.   Thomas Paine wrote an influential essay in 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal advocating abolition.  George Washington grew to hate slavery and wrote that it was his fondest wish “to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.”  As a young man, Thomas Jefferson was one of the strongest leaders in pushing for the abolition of slavery:   he denounced the institution in his book Notes On The State of Virginia and formulated a plan of gradual abolition that featured an end to the slave trade, the prohibition of slavery, and the establishment of a date in which newly born children of slaves would be free.    In the 1770s and 1780s, Jefferson pushed in the Virginia legislature and the federal government to face up to the issue of slavery;  in 1784, Jefferson pushed for a bill to prohibit slavery in the western territories that failed to pass by a single vote.

Why did the Founding Fathers fail?  From reading Joseph Ellis book Founding Brothers, the leaders of the new United States wanted a plan that would gradually free the slaves, compensate slaveowners, and separate the freed slaves from the white society.  In other words, they wanted a way to free the slaves without bankrupting the slaveowners.   Besides Jefferson’s plan in Notes On The State of Virginia, prominent Virginians Fernando Fairfax and St. George Tucker submitted plans on the freeing of slaves.  Critics felt that these plans had a high cost for compensating the slaveowners and separating the freed slaves from white society  that seemed to large for the fledging government to absorb.    Thomas Jefferson stopped taking the lead after the mid 1780s in the fight for abolition, because he began to realize the debts that he incurred due to his aristocratic living.   Much of the southern aristocracy was in debt, due to their reliance on land as their source of wealth.  The issue of slavery floundered over economics.  Joseph Ellis wrote in his book Founding Brothers:

“The Virginia gentry were psychologically incapable of sharing Hamilton’s affinity with men who made their living manipulating interest rates.  Land, not fluid forms of capital, was their ultimate measure of wealth.  Investment bankers and speculators, as they saw it, made no productive contribution to society.  All they did was move paper around and adjust numbers.  At the nub, the issue was not rich versus poor or the few versus the many, since the planter class of Virginia was just as much an elite minority as the wealthy merchants of New York or Boston.  The issue was agrarian versus commercial sources of wealth.

Nor did it help that a significant percentage of Virginia’s landed class, Jefferson among them, were heavily in debt to British and Scottish creditors, who were compounding their interest rates faster than the profit margins in tobacco and wheat could match.  One cannot help but suspect that the beleaguered aristocracy of Virginia saw in Hamilton and his beloved commercial elite of the northern cities the American replicas of British bankers who were bleeding them to death.”

I don’t agree with Zinn’s sometimes harsh assessment of the Founding Fathers, but I do agree with his assessment of the limits that the economic system placed on their democratic ideas.  Zinn wrote:

“Banneker asked Jefferson ‘to wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices which you have imbibed.’

Jefferson tried his best, as an enlightened, thoughtful individual might.  But the structure of American society, the power of the cotton, the slave trade, the politics of unity between northern and southern elites, and the long culture of race prejudice in the colonies, as well as his own weaknesses- that combination of practical need and idealogical fixation- kept Jefferson a slaveowner throughout his life.

The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation- all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution.”

Thus those progressive Virginians, whom the northern states once hoped would lead the South in abolition, were paralyzed into inaction.  Some enlightened Virginians that were financially well off did free their own slaves, especially after the Virginia legislature passed a law permitting slave owners to free their own slaves at their own discretion.  Robert Carter III, the richest man in Virginia, freed his 500 slaves and gave up his plantation.  George Washington set up a will that made strict provisions to free his slaves after the death of his wife, and to sell off portions of his land to support his freed slaves.  These were good individual acts, but this was a drop in the bucket for the 700,000 slaves that existed during the first decade of the United States.

I deeply admire the Founding Fathers for their courage in founding a new nation and their wisdom in creating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  They tried to apply the ideas of the enlightenment to create the first steps in a democratic government.   In spite of their great achievements, they were only human, and they made mistakes.  One of their greatest mistakes was their inability to find a solution to the issue of slavery.   Almost all of the Founding Fathers realized that their inability to find a political solution to slavery insured that at some point a violent civil war would be inevitable.  Thomas Jefferson spoke for them all when he wrote in a correspondence to John Adams:

“The real question, as seen in the states afflicted with this unfortunate population, is Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?  For if Congress has a power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free.  Are we then to …. wage another Peloponessian War to settle the ascendancy between them.  That question remains to be seen:  but not I hope by you or me.  Surely they will parlay awhile, and give us time to get out of the way.”

Nanking Documentary

Tomorrow in the Bay Area, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s documentary “Nanking” will open in the Bay Area. Featured in the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, it chronicled the invasion by the Imperial Japanese Army of the city Nanking in December 1937 and the devastation that the Japanese Army wrecked upon the Chinese inhabitants. In the official website(http://www.nankingthefilm.com/synopsis.aspx) the film is summarized as such:

“By November 12th, Shanghai had fallen and by December 13th, the Japanese had defeated the defending Chinese army and invaded the city of Nanking.

The events now known as ‘the rape of Nanking’ lasted approximately six weeks. The city was looted and burned, and marauding Japanese soldiers unleashed a staggering wave of violence on Nanking’s population. According to the summary judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – also known as the Tokyo Trials, ‘estimates indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred in the city during the first month of the occupation.’

Prior to the fall of the city, many Chinese fled the approaching troops and all foreign citizens were ordered to evacuate. A group of 22 European and American expatriates, however, refused to leave. Despite devastating air strikes and the threat of an oncoming army, these Westerners – including John Rabe, a Nazi businessman; Bob Wilson, an American surgeon; and Minni Vautrin, the American headmistress of a missionary college – remained behind in order to set up a Safety Zone to protect civilians. Some two hundred thousand refugees crowded into the Zone, which spanned two square miles. During the brutal occupation, Safety Zone committee members vehemently protested the army’s actions to the Japanese authorities, but the carnage continued. Every day John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, and the others fought to keep the Safety Zone’s boundaries intact and the refugees safe.”

For many Asians of my parents generation, the Japanese militarism of the 1930s and 1940s is still a painful wound that has not healed. I know many older Filipinos who still are angry at Japan for the cruelty it inflicted when they invaded the Philippines. Iris Chang’s book “The Rape of Nanking” was a wake up for Asian Americans of my age, especially Chinese Americans. I used to attend an evangelical Chinese American church in the 1990s, and I remember conversations on how Chang’s book helped many people to better understand what their parents and grandparents went through during the great war.

“Nanking” reminds us of the cruelties of war. This movie is not a condemnation of the Japanese people, but it condemns a militaristic mentality that all nations are vulnerable to. This militaristic mentality glorifies war and conquest and brings out the worst in people. With the wars that America is involved with in Iraq and Afganistan, the families of those soldiers serving do not need to be reminded of the costs of war. But there are other areas in the world that are devastated by war that Americans take little notice of.

Norman Rockwell and the Civil Rights Paintings

Fifty years after he first started doing work for the magazine, Norman Rockwell was tired of doing the same sweet views of America for the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1960s.   The great illustrator was increasingly influenced by his close friends and loved ones to look at some of the problems that was afflicting American society.  Rockwell had formed close friendships with Erik Erickson and Robert Coles, psychiatrists specializing in the treatment of children and both were advocates of the civil rights movement.  His most profound influence was his third wife, Mary L. “Molly” Punderson, who was an ardent liberal and who urged him in new directions.  On December 14, 1963, Rockwell did his last cover for the Saturday Evening Post and he began working for Look magazine.   Look magazine finally gave Norman Rockwell the opportunity to express his social concerns.

Rockwell’s first painting was The Problem We All Live With, one of his greatest paintings.  This painting depicts Ruby Bridges, the little girl who integrated the New Orleans school system in 1960, being escorted to her class by federal marshalls in the face of hostile crowds.  It’s a simple picture, the disembodied figures of 4 stiff suited men and the vulnerable yet defiant figure of a school age African American girl marching lockstep.  To the right is a tomatoe staining a wall, obviously thrown at the girl but just missing.   My eyes focus on the girl and her immaculate white, a contrast to the grafittie stained wall in the background.  As a painting it’s a wonder, with it’s composition conveying Rockwell’s message in a few simple figures.  To look at the picture, go to http://www.phxart.org/pastexhibitions/problem.asp.

An even greater departure from Rockwell’s usual sweet America paintings is Southern Justice, painted in 1963.  Rockwell did a finished painting, but the editors published Rockwell’s color study instead, and I think his color study conveys the terror of the scene more successfully.  It depicts the deaths of 3 Civil Rights workers who were killed for their efforts to register African American voters.  It is done in a monochrome sienna color, and it is a horrifying vision of racism.   A look of it can be seen in http://ulcercity.blogspot.com/2008/01/welcome-to-neighborhood-race-rockwell.html.

Rockwell’s most optimistic view of the civil rights movement was Negro In The Suburbs, painted in 1967.  It depicts an African American family moving into a white suburban neighborhood.  The African American childrens look over by the kids in the neighborhood, with all the children sharing a love of baseball, America’s game.  This painting can be found in http://www.normanrockwell.com/artwork/galleries/last/image18.htm.

My favorite Norman Rockwell paintings were those that he painted from the 1940s to the 1960s.  Rockwell’s paintings for Look were I think some of his greatest, and they showed an artist that was always willing to take risks.   Rockwell is often nowadays seen nowadays as a conservative painter of American myth, but these Civil Rights paintings show a liberal sensibility concerned about the problems of living up to our American ideas.   These paintings are, in my estimation, comparable to Goya’s paintings of the horrors of the massacre of the Spanish people by Napoleon’s troops, or Daumier’s illustrations of the corrupt political order.    In the year 2001, I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachussetts.  It is situated in a beautiful wooded area.  When I visited the museum and looked at Rockwell’s paintings face to face, I felt like I was visiting an important part of American history.    I didn’t see the Civil Rights paintings during my visit, but I saw many of his other paintings and it gave me an appreciation of Rockwell as an artist.  To know more, look at http://www.nrm.org/.

Granny D

When I first started attending St. Thomas Episcopal Church, one of the first persons to befriend me was an 84 year old lady.  We found we had a great love of books and one day she handed me a book to read.  It was titled Granny D:  Walking Across America in My 90th Year, by Doris Hadock and Dennis Burke.    Granny D chronicles Doris Hadock, who walked across the U.S. in 2000 at the age of 90 to highlight the need of campaign finance reform.  I was instantly enchanted by Hadock, and admired her life of activism and her love of our country.  My friend loved Hadock’s motto in life:  you’re never too old to raise a little hell. 

Doris had a life time of raising a little hell.  She was a flapper as a young woman of the 1920s and she performed one-woman feminist plays in the 1930s.  In 1960 Doris and her husband demonstrated to stop nuclear testing near an Eskimo fishing village.  During the 1990s Doris became more and more disturbe at the influence corporate financing had upon the politicians who ran our country, so she decided to talk a 3,000 mile walk from California to Washington D.C. to highlight the need for campaign finance reform.  As she walked, she met Americans of all stripes and classes, all eager for the average person to have some say again in the democratic processes.   Doris wrote in her book, “In my long walk, I am trying to get some new laws passed that will make it easier for people to be responsible for their own communities and their own government.  I worry that the influence of very rich companies and very rich people make it difficult for regular people to feel that they are in charge of their own affairs.  We need to get the big, special interest contributions out of our elections.   Those contributions shout down you and me, and there is no true free speech nor true political equality so long as this condition persists.”

In 2004 a surprise vacancy in the Democratic nomination for the New Hampshire Senator race led Doris to run for the Senate against incubent Republican Judd Gregg.  This was documented in a wonderful movie Run Granny Run.  Doris had never run in any political office before but she continued repeating the themes that she made during her walk in 2000.   The highlight of the film is the runup to the televised debate with Judd Gregg.  Doris was very nervous before the debate, but she did a credible job against Gregg.  One of the most infuriarating things for me to see was how Democratic party leaders like Howard Dean ignored Doris and kept at arms length from her campaign.  In listening to Doris’ response to various voters’ questions, I heard an intelligent, progressive and reasonable voice.

In reading her book and watching the documentary, I grew to admire Doris Hadock’s spunk and courage, and respect her opinions on various issues facing the nation.   Doris shows that our government doesn’t just belong to lawyers and lobbyists and businesspeople, that our government must stay responsive to the people and the grassroots.   In an excerpt of a speech that Doris made in Cumberland, Maryland on January 24, 2000, Granny D said:

“For those of ou who have lived a long life and think you are finished with it, I tell you that, if you will pray for courage and look to the needs of your community rather than yourself, a great energy and happiness will come to you.  Indeed, your community needs your wisdom and your patience.  Your family needs you, too, whether or not they believe it.  Your country needs you.

Friends, look at this country- our genius republic- this great sailing vessel we have built that we might find our way to the future together as free and equal citizens, as friends and partners in self-governance.  Though it is two and a quarter centuries old, the paint still smells new some days, and the flag still snaps in the wind.  But what a price we have paid for it!  I do not have to remind you of the rows upon rows of marble stones that mark the sacrifices our friends and our children and our fathers and their fathers have made to build this great craft and keep it safe.

But now, in a time when people are so stressed in their lives and are so unaware of what it means to truly live well- to live free, to live with enough leisure and confidence to be the stewards of their own lives and communities- in this time, we strangeley find ourselves having to explain why it is a bad thing if multinational corporations control our elections, and why it is a bad thing if our elected leaders no longer represent the interests of the people.

I know that some of these people just need to be awakened.  We can do that.  We can show them a future they will want.  But there are others who know very well what has been lost in this nation over the last few decades, and they have lowered their fists slowly in despair.  To them, to my generation and the generation younger and the generation older, I cry to you please- don’t give up the ship!”

Dr. Seuss and PM Magazine

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a beloved children’s book creator named Dr. Seuss created political cartoons for a radical leftist newspaper.   Yes, the same Dr. Seuss who wrote beloved stories like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and The Cat In The Hat did cartoons excorciating Hitler, Jim Crow and isolationists during World War II.  Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, has always had a strong liberal streak in his children’s books,  and they find their most clear distillation in the editorial cartoons that he did for the New York newspaper, PM, during the 1940s.  A wonderful book, Dr. Seuss Goes to War:  The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geissel by Richard H. Minear, showcases the 400 cartoons that Dr. Seuss did for PM.

Ralph Ingersoll was a prominent journalist who worked for Time and Life magazine and founded the newspaper PM as a progressive voice that supported the continuation of the New Deal reforms and the fight for economic and social justice.  Within its pages, some of the greatest names on American journalism wrote articles on the events of the day:  James Thurber, I.F. Stone, Heywood Hale Broun, Lillian Hellman, and Jimmy Cannon.  One of the great comics was published only in PM, “Barnaby” by Crockett Johnson, who later was famous as the creator of Harold and the Purple Crayon.  

Dr. Seuss began working as editorial cartoonist for PM from 1941 to January 1943, and at that time he created some of the best editorial cartoons in the U.S.  Art Spiegelman wrote in the introduction of the book:

“These cartoons rail against isolationism, racism, and ant-Semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period.  These are virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism.  Dr. Seuss said that he ‘had no great causes or interest in social issues until Hitler,’ and explained that ‘PM was against people who pushed other people around.  I liked that.’  More of a humanist than an idealogue- one of those Groucho rather than Karl Marxists- Dr. Seuss made these drawings with the fire of honest indignation and anger that fuels all real political art.  If they have a flaw, it’s an absolutely endearing one:  they’re funny.”

In looking at this collection, I’m amazed at his skills in conveying a message simply and succinctly.  My only real criticism of these cartoons is the way Dr. Seuss portrays Japan, with the same Asian stereotypes that were prevalent in the U.S. of the 1940s.    Seuss tackled fascism, racism, worker’s rights, the independence movement in India, government red tape, and civil liberties in time of war with gentle humor.

 Dr. Seuss maintained a concern for political issues long after he stopped being an editorial cartoonist for PM.  As his fame grew as a children’s book creator,  Dr. Seuss tackled such subjects as totalitarianism (Yertle the Turtle, 1958), environmentalism (The Lorax, 1971), discrimination (The Sneetches and Other Stories, 1961), and nuclear war (The Butter Battle Book, 1984).    Dr. Seuss was not just a great creator of children’s books, his concerns encompassed the problems of people of all ages.  And that’s what made him a great artist.

Admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.

I was one year old when Martin Luther King Jr. died, so I can’t really say that I knew him when.   Growing up as a Filipino American in the America of the 1970s and 1980s, though, he was still a presence in my life.   I saw a lot of excerpts of his “I Have a Dream” speech playing on t.v. and his words gave me this feeling that this was a man to be respected and admired.    Spending my early childhood in military bases, where I played with kids of many different races and religions, I never experienced any racism or prejudice, so the injustices that King talked about seemed like something from long ago.  It wasn’t until my Dad retired in 1979 and we had to live in public housing that I encountered racism of any sort and it was a shock to me.   When I heard the “I Had A Dream” excerpts on t.v. that year, it gave me the first appreciation of what King was fighting against. 

I began to really think more about Dr. King when U2 came out with the song Pride (In the Name of Love).  At that time, a big debate was going on about the passing of a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.  I remember being flabergasted by some of the arguments of opponents of the holiday, the accusations of King being a communist and a minor figure in history.  I checked out from the library some biographies of King and the more I got to know King, the more I admired him.  King had his faults, like all human beings do.  But he was courageous in his belief of nonviolent change, especially in the late 1960s when the movement for equal rights began to turn towards the more militant philosophies of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers.  His idea that the fight for equal rights meant redeeming the oppressor as well as the oppressed made a lot of sense to me.

The big influence on my admiration for King was the series Eyes on the Prize, a PBS documentary that aired in the late 1980s.  It put King’s contributions in the context of the larger struggle for civil rights.  I learned about the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the fight to desegregate the schools, the work of student groups like SNCC and CORE and African American churches, the protest demonstrations in Selma and Birmingham.    Through it all, I admire King’s perserverance, and the risks he took in challenging first the South and it’s segregationist society, and later Lyndon Johnson and his war in Vietnam.  The greatest successes of King and the early Civil Rights movement was in pushing JFK and LBJ to pass civil rights legislation for political equality.  When King and the civil rights activists began focusing to the north and the problems of urban ghettos, they had less success.  King began to equate full equal rights with the need for a fuller economic justice, and at the time that he died, he was organizing a poor people’s march on Washington D.C.

Another program that influenced me during the 1980s was a one hour PBS program on a fictional meeting between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  They debated each other’s ideas, and when I look at it now, it’s a good example of the influence and interdependence of moderates and radicals.  I think both men influenced each other:  after Malcolm X’s trip to Mecca in 1964, he began to move closer to King’s idea of whites and blacks living together in peace;  in the late 1960s King began moving towards Malcolm’s ideas of the economic system needing a more radical restructuring to resolve the problems of the slums. 

When we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day, we shouldn’t just celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr.  King was a great American but he didn’t achieve the things that he did in a vaccuum.  King greatly benefitted from the work that came before him, from the work of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, the litigation work of the National Association of the Advencement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association,  the writings of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.  King fought for civil rights with contemporaries like Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, Marian Edelman Wright, Malcolm X, and Stokeley Carmichael.  If we are to remember King’s achievements, we have to remember groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  As an Asian American, I deeply appreciate the opportunities that I have now because of the struggles that King and all these other people had to force America to live up to its highest values.  For that I am deeply grateful.

Ralph Fasanella- Artist of the Worker

I discovered Ralph Fasanella in the pages of Smithsonian magazine sometime in the 1990s.  The article talked about a man who worked in a gas station by day, and painted wonderful works of art by night.  His paintings were colorful and well composed and they showed working class people in New York neighborhoods, at play in baseball games, protesting for the right to organize in unions.    These paintings were accessible and full of the joy and sadness of ordinary workers’ lives.  A few years later a coworker gave me a calender of Fasanella pictures.  Caught up in the art once again, I bought Paul D’Ambrosio’s book Ralph Fasanella’s America from Amazon.com.

He was one of the great self taught artists of the 20th Century, an artist who dedicated his work to chronicle the history of the workers’ struggles to gain rights in America.   Fasanella’s own life gave abundant resources for his work:  at various times he was a garment worker, a truck driver, an ice delivery man, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and a union organizer.   During the 1950s, he was blacklisted and harassed by the government for his progressive politics.  A lifetime in the midst of the workers’ struggles gave his paintings a strong understanding of a particular time in Progressive American history, and it is a particularly apt reminder for these times when unions have been in decline and corporate interests once again rule.

Fasanella began painting during the 1940s.   From the very beginning, he took as subject matter the worker’s life and progressive worker’s history.  May Day, a huge painting made in 1948, is one of his best early paintings and it depicts a throng of marchers of all races and ethnic backgrounds marching under a banner of “Peace, Democracy, and Security”.    At the top center of the painting is a shrine to Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Franklin Roosevelt, and below them, are pictures of early radical heroes like Karl Marx and Sacco and Vanzetti.  You can look at the painting at the Gallery Felicie site http://www.galleryfelicie.com/Large.asp?id=10.

For 20 years, from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s, Ralph worked by day at a gas station that he owned and at night he would work at his paintings.  The paintings during this time are, in my opinion, his best paintings.  My favorite painting of Fasanella’s, Family Supper, was made at this time.    Family Supper depicts a working class family having dinner in a city tenement.  In the background of the family dinner is a crucifixion painting of the mother and the father, symbolizing for me the sacrifices of these parents for their families.  It’s a very joyous and intimate painting for me, and it reminds me of the sacrifices of my own parents, who immigrated from the Philippines to give my siblings and I a better life in America.  Take a look at this painting at the Gallery Felicie site http://www.galleryfelicie.com/Large.asp?id=7.

Fasanella continued to make great paintings up to the end of his life in 1997.  He also continued to support worker’s unions, taking part in a strike by Portuguese fishermen in 1986 and a strike by the Newspaper Guild in 1990.  Ralph Fasanella believed that it was important to honor the history of the working people in America.  One of Fasanella’s favorite poems was written by Norman Bethune, a physician and humanitarian.  It neatly encapsulates the aspirations of Fasanella’s art.

The function of the artist is to
disturb.  His duty is to arouse
the sleepers, to shake the complacent
pillars of the world.  He reminds the
world of its dark ancestry, shows the
world its present, and points the way
to its new birth.  He is at once the
product and the preceptor of his time.
After his passage we are troubled
and made unsure of our too-easily
accepted realities.  He makes uneasy
the static, the set, and the still.

He is an agitator, a disturbor of the
peace- quick, impatient, positive,
restless and disquieting.  He is the
creative spirit working in the soul of man.