Music Credits: Traditional Sicilian Polka by Maestro Antonio Calsolaro and Francesco Polito. Performed in 2012. Transcript [Music Up] Leslie Umberger: Ralph Fasanella was a really interesting artist.  I don't think he ever intended to become an artist, but it clearly was his calling.  He became an artist in his adult life, and it grew in large part out of his union activism, and when he realized that painting and making images could be a really strong tool for communicating with his fellow worker and kind of galvanizing support for the things he really cared about.  Jo Reed: That's Leslie Umberger.  She curated the recent show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. [Music Out] Ralph Fasanella was an American original. A New Yorker through and through, he was a blue-collar worker from a working class family. He drove trucks, pumped gas, and delivered ice. He was a textile factory worker and a union organizer. Somewhere along the way, he became a self-taught painter and as he put it, "He fell in love with art." Fasanella's paintings, often overtly political,  depict the lives of working urban people on the streets, at union meetings, on strike, and at baseball games. The  paintings are colorful,  often large in scale and packed with symbolic imagery. There are many reasons  for Ralph Fasanella to kick off our new podcast series about everyday art and the often unlikely people who create it.   Ralph always claimed Labor Day as his birthday and he would have been 100 years old this week.  His exhibition has traveled to New York City and opened this past Tuesday at the American Folk Art Museum. But most of all, there are his paintings: often brilliant, surreal, complicated canvasses that capture the heart and soul of working Americans.  As I mentioned, Leslie Umberger recently curated a major exhibition of Ralph Fasanella's work.  Here's Leslie's take on Ralph Fasanella. Leslie Umberger: Ralph Fasanella was born in 1914 and he was born to parents who had immigrated from Italy and had come over with the great wave of immigrants that fueled the rise of industrial America and was a time when huge numbers of immigrant labor really favored the industrial bosses and there was no regulations for the workers. And so, his mother was this amazing agent of change in the neighborhood and she was a very progressive thinker, a very smart person, and she cared very deeply about teaching her son the ways in which they could use what they had to be powerful. And if they didn't have money, what they do is they could have strength in numbers, and that they could be educated and that they could take up causes and really fight for their rights.  So he was really born and raised on the ideals that gave rise to the American unions, and his father had an ice delivery route and Ralph, as a child, worked on that route.  So he started actually working when he was around eight and by the time he was a teenager, he was regularly contributing to the family what funds he had working as a delivery boy.  These jobs grew into other things.  He eventually became a truck driver and a gas station operator and eventually really landed the job that would serve his character the best, which was he became a union organizer. Jo Reed: Now, when did he begin to paint, Leslie?  Do we know when and do we know what motivated this? Leslie Umberger: He didn't become to paint until he was 31, and so by then he was a fairly seasoned individual.  He had a clear understand of what his views were as a person, but he also had a lot to grapple with.  He had been raised to really think that you needed to value those who had gone before you and respect family and bring these things with you.  But also, he was directed towards thinking progressively and always trying to change things.  So he kind of had this struggle between tradition and change that lasted his whole life, and when he started painting, he first started doing it because he had some sort of pain in his hands.  It might have been arthritis, but somebody suggested that he try sketching.  So he tried that and discovered he was really good at it and that he really liked it, and then it kind of clicked for him that drawing and making images could be a lot like folk songs, that it didn't have to be this rarified thing.  It could be something that really spoke to people, that reached them in this really direct way and so he started making images. Jo Reed: And he was really adamant that he had no interest in a lead art whatsoever? Leslie Umberger: He was a firm believer that the art world was a little bit too full of itself.  He appreciated what it had to offer and he certainly, as he became interested in his art, he started going to museums more and trying to learn some of the lessons that were available to him about how art could be a good communicator.  But he did believe that the art world was elitist and that he had no interest in following that path, and at the same time he also knew that he didn't want to be called primitive, that he didn't want to be thought of as somebody who couldn't think or wasn't smart enough.  What he really wanted to do was to use art as a powerful tool or a weapon.  He wanted it to be something useful for communicating. Jo Reed: Describe his painting and his painting technique and then we can talk about his subject. Leslie Umberger: His paintings change a lot over time.  It's interesting to see him learn as a self-taught artist, somebody who's really kind of navigating the tools of the mechanics of paintings. His earlier images are much more flattened and you can tell that he's struggling with how to balance the composition with his message, and as he goes the images get larger and they get more complex and as he becomes a mature artist, they suddenly read very much like newspapers.  They very much mirror his way of thinking and ingesting and are kind of an array of facts, an array of moments.  They're almost a collage but they're laid out in this way that is much more painterly and that you can follow them, kind of meander around.  There's a narrative there but it isn't necessarily linear.  Jo Reed: Yeah, exactly and they have literal newspaper headlines. There's a lot of writing in his work and his subject kind of changes over time as well. Talk about what his focus was and what he was looking at, the story that he wanted to tell through his art. Leslie Umberger: I think he had more than one purpose, and certainly his interests changed at various moments in his life. I think of some of the earlier imagery as personal, exploring his own struggles, things with watching his friends and family leave the city towards the suburbs, something that he thought was a heartbreaking thing. He loved the unity and the heartbeat of the city and he thought that the suburbs were this place of isolation and he also explored a lot of ideas of family. He had a very powerful series called The Iceman Series, in which he explores the relationship he had with his father, which was a fairly difficult relationship and one that I think he spent a lifetime really thinking about.  He knew his father best really as a child when he worked with him on the ice route, and that wasn't a great time for Ralph.  The hours were hard, the work was tough and I think his father drove him pretty hard and it caused fights and Ralph rebelled a little bit and, you know that rebellion ended up landing him in Catholic reform school for a few years, and by the time Ralph came out, the marriage of his parents had deteriorated and his father moved out and some years later actually retreated back to Italy and they would never see him again.  And so this relationship with the patriarch that he is supposed to revere and honor is very imbalanced with the reality he experienced, and so the Ice Man Series explores that; how do you navigate this difficult terrain and have both things be true - that you could still respect and love somebody and have been very challenged by them. Jo Reed: And he has the ice man in these four paintings crucified in various ways and in different circumstances. Leslie Umberger: Yeah, he has cast him as the crucified Christ figure and in that way equated him with all of the working men, the sacrifices of the whole laboring class.  He was inspired to do that series by a 1939 novel called Christ in Concrete, and in that novel a bricklayer was killed in the line of duty and he was very much-- you know, his sacrifices were aligned with those of Christ, and Fasanella had this ah-ha moment about how you could use symbolism in this very direct and simple way and it was sort of his entrée to departing from very realistic imagery into things that are much more lyrical and personalized. And the first paintings in that series are a little bit rigid.  They kind of cast the blue collared worker as this crucified figure with, he's got the ice tongs around his head and his palms are held to the cross with ice picks, so the tools of his trade very much become the implements of torture. By the end of this series, you can see that his symbolism is flowering all over the painting, that he has the old neighborhood on one side, the colder suburbs on the other side, and kind of this transition where the ice man was once the cornerstone of the neighborhood, everything hinged on his coming and going, to this unbelievable day that had arrived when the ice man wasn't even necessary anymore and he was being hauled away as the refrigerators get delivered. Jo Reed: Well, his motto was "Lest we forget." Leslie Umberger: The Iceman Crucified #4, that was the first painting he put that on there and I think that that is a very defining painting for him.  It really is one where he understands that you can both remember and move on at the same time. Jo Reed: His cityscapes that come after that are remarkable, and I grew up in New York and I just embraced them when I saw them.  They give such a sense of the heart of a city and I think it's this wonderful juxtaposition of the vastness of the city but then there are so many cutouts, if you will, looking in little windows where you see life happening in all of them.  They're so intricate. Leslie Umberger: He was really good at that.  It's one of his signature moments is to both show the buildings and cut into them.  He wanted to really give you this idea that city living was tight, it was tooth by jowl, but it was also rich and vibrant and clean and respectful and wonderful in many ways, and the painting "New York City" becomes this master work in which he pays homage to the city that he grew up in, lived his whole life in and that he truly loved, and he does something that I think trained painters would be more hesitant to do in which he really is able to marry street scene and skyline in a very particular way. And it's almost as though by not going through the formal training of perspective and how something should be, he sort of just dials in to how something feels in this really remarkable way, and I think the painting is quite brilliant. I think in a way New York City becomes a self-portrait of Ralph Fasanella. I chose to open the exhibition with that because I really felt like in so many ways it summed up who he was and what he cared about. Jo Reed: He also, as we mentioned, cared about politics and many of the paintings are a commentary on the politics of the time, most particularly, the death of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and McCarthyism that haunted the '50s. Leslie Umberger: McCarthyism was of course something that was a personal issue for Ralph Fasanella.  As an American who aligned himself with communist causes, he was very chagrinned to think about such people being called un-American.  He thought that, you know, what they stood for and what they believed in was really at the heart of what Americans should care about and he, of course, believed himself to be a very loyal and dedicated American. And in 1954 he did the painting Garden Party which has Ethel and Julius Rosenberg seated at the center of the image and they are atop a burning pyre of books. And he was very interested in that subject, he worked on it for some years, and of course what happens then is that Ralph Fasanella himself is blacklisted. And he is at that point-- really feels thwarted from making political imagery for a while, and he turns back to some of the family topics and he starts painting things like New York City and some of those major works played out in that time when he felt like his imagery couldn't be overtly political, and yet, you can read through the lines and kind of still see his communist viewpoints.  They're just less overt.  But then when support for McCarthyism wanes in the late 1950s, he returns immediately to the subject of the Rosenbergs, which still really haunted him. Jo Reed: It's so interesting how much he manages to get on a canvas, and you're right, it's certainly not linear but it's absolutely coherent and you can move from one part of the canvas to another and just get pieces of this story that all come together. Leslie Umberger: He is remarkable at doing that, and some work better than others.  But when he really hits it, he hits it right on, and you're able to kind of meander back and forth and in and out and read it very clearly. And even if you don't understand every symbol at first reading, it lets you unfold it over time, and as you revisit it there are lots of moments of discovery, and for that reason I think it stays rich for a long time. Jo Reed: He had another breakthrough in the 1960s.  It was the Civil Rights Movement; that's something that certainly Ralph Fasanella supported. Leslie Umberger: It's possible that Ralph would have continued to paint subjects like the Rosenbergs for some time, but not that long after he finished the last one, Gray Day, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and his attention turned very quickly and entirely to this tragedy that he of course felt the right had been behind. And when he took this painting on, he uses what he's learned in the past few years of really organizing the structure so that there's a strong central topic and then you can follow on either side of the canvas these opposing events.  So on one side you've got a chronicle of various civil rights events, the March on Washington, the Birmingham riots, the slain civil rights workers.  There's a lot of things over in that half of the painting, and then on the other half of the painting you have the industrial south, and you've got oil wells, you've also got missile silos and you've got this crowd of people that are both welcoming the president to Dallas and also, you know, holding up signs saying things like, "Get out Yank."  So he's setting up this tension, and like he did in some of the earlier atomic age and McCarthy era paintings, he again evokes this kind of toxic atmosphere by giving the sky a very dark, unpleasant tone, and he's communicating that the age just felt the weight of that stress and that it was omnipresent in the way you went about your daily life.  Jo Reed: Modern Times depicts Ralph's uneasiness with the way the country is moving in the 1960s.  His support for the Civil Rights Movement aside, apparently he was not enamored of the counter-culture.  Leslie Umberger: He was not a fan of the counter-culture.  He was very much of his generation in that he thought that the counter-culture movement didn't get it. He thought they weren't taking seriously what their forbearers had done for them and that they weren't taking seriously something that he had invested his whole life in, this message of "You stand on the shoulders of those who went before you," so he really did have a major problem with it, and I think Modern Times is a very conflicted image.  It's a little bit hard to follow but it does the same thing where it breaks out kind of a left and a right side, and on the left you have these very human moments: you've got the pope visiting, a big crowd at Yankee stadium.  You've got soldiers returning home from war and there's strikers.  Everything has to do with people and these moments of life the way he remembered it; he social fabric of America. And on the other side, he has this big industrial complex that sort of brings together the scientific pursuits, the industrial pursuits, these elite art factions, all of the sides of the United States that he thought were kind of headed in the wrong direction, things that he thought were anti-human, that were really working against people, and of course the art world is in there.  The Museum of Modern Art appears in this acerbic way because he thought that the art world had really maligned him as being primitive and stupid and he strongly resented those characterizations. Jo Reed: And it's around this time that he became friends, and there's no surprise here, with Pete Seeger, another great leftist folk hero. Leslie Umberger: Yeah, and Pete Seeger, of course, was a great model for Ralph in so many ways and it makes perfect sense that the two would become friends.  They had a lot in common in terms of how you really become the instrument of change and it's just you and the people and what you can do. Jo Reed: And it's around this time that he paints a really marvelous painting, Family Supper. If the other paintings are conflicted, this I think is a more unified vision. Leslie Umberger: I think Family Supper is among his great masterpieces.  It's really a fantastic image and a lot comes together for Ralph Fasanella in this painting and I think the most striking thing is that he realizes that his mother had been the head of the family the whole time and that his struggle to try to place his father as the honored patriarch had been a model that didn't really fit in their family, and that his mother had been this person who raised six children. She worked in the garment industry the whole time. She was hugely active in her community with the unions and laborers rights issues, and she took those kids everywhere to make sure that they were well familiar with people whose lives were harder than their own.  And he places her at the center of the image and also the center of the family table, and above that table represents her again. And this time she is the crucified Christ figure; Joe the ice man appears also as the crucified ice figure off to the right, but he's kind of sidelined.  He's like, "Yeah, you were there and you paid your dues and you did sacrifice, but really you weren't the central hero to this story so you're kind of over here now." At the bottom on the other side there's a melting bucket of ice and it says something to the effect of, "The poor bastard died broke, to all the Joes who died the same."  Both sad but disdainful.  So Ginevra, his mother, becomes the hero of the family and the imagery is both of the Italian-American home, but very much the home situated within the fabric of New York, and again at the top, both the "Lest we forget," and Ginevra now bears her own cross which says, "WHS" for "We have suffered." Jo Reed: In the 1970s he is suddenly discovered.  What happens and how does this change his life? Leslie Umberger: Around 1970 he was discovered by a folk art enthusiast by the name of Frederick Fried, and Fried helped him get an agent and the agent got Ralph to be featured as a cover artist on New York Magazine. And I think the headline said, "Ralph Fasanella may be the best primitive artist since Grandma Moses," and of course, for Ralph this was a mixed blessing.  He wanted the publicity, he wanted to send his message and I think he wanted to be able to make a living off of his art.  But, you know, he didn't want to do it by being called primitive.  He didn't like that. But he did take off at that point, that did make him incredibly popular, and I think that really was challenging for Ralph. He wasn't used to being the center of attention.  He was just a regular guy and suddenly everybody wanted to interview him, do shows, and for Ralph, who was both in demand to do all sorts of work surrounding, you know, exhibitions and trying to sell things and make posters and have a business related to his art, but also create the next best painting, turn out the next masterpiece, and a lot of American artists in history fell prey to this same kind of machine. Jo Reed: But he finds his feet. Leslie Umberger: He finds his feet.  He decides that he needs a project and like we were saying, he wasn't that taken with the times.  He didn't find the politics of the era to be inspiring, and so he decided to look back historically at something and take on something that was formative for his parents and for a whole generation of people that propelled the labor movement. And he chooses the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, which had taken place in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And so he went down to Lawrence and becomes very enamored with this subject and eventually ends up spending three years in Lawrence doing the research, talking to people, sketching, trying to learn how the machines actually worked, going to the library and the textile museums to really get a understanding of what it was that had happened there and how he could represent it, and something that he did that was really important in that community was he started connecting the people whose family members had been part of that strike with that history, connecting the documents of the time with the living family members. And he made the event meaningful to the community in a way that I think maybe it hadn't been before and they took some ownership in it. Jo Reed: And how many paintings did he do in this series? Leslie Umberger: He eventually did 18 major paintings, really large scale paintings, countless sketches and the paintings are a real testament to his commitment.  They're incredibly detailed, they're epic in scale and they really did secure his reputation as a painter.   Jo Reed: He was also part of the Public Domain Project with Ron Carver, who's a labor organizer. Why don't you tell us what the point of that was? Leslie Umberger: Ron Carver became very instrumental in making sure that Ralph Fasanella's paintings were well placed in institutions and organizations around the country.  Ron put together a grassroots organization called Public Domain and the goal of the organization was to raise money, acquire paintings that had sold and were in private collections and to then donate those paintings to public institutions. And Ron, of course, went about this with the zeal of a union organizer and really made it his life's passion and did an incredible job at doing this, and the Family Supper painting was among those that were placed.  It went to the Ellis Island Museum, an incredibly important place for it to be and really meaningful, and they also placed some of the Lawrence series paintings in, one of the major works belongs to the AFLCIO, another of the major pieces belongs to the Lawrence Heritage State Park Museum.  So over the course of that project, they placed over 50 major paintings with public institutions. Jo Reed: And part of the way they got attention for this work was by bringing Ralph Fasanella to these communities to speak, but also to schools where he spoke to students and that was very, very instructive for the students. Leslie Umberger: I think Ralph had a lot to offer in those moments. Those are, when I watch some of the footage of him talking to students, I see that special spark that untrained artists often have with kids and young people, but also people in general, where they're imparting this idea that anybody can make a difference. These kids are listening to a guy who just comes across as a regular guy. But he's funny and he's charming, but he's one of them and so they can buy into that and they can see themselves in that trajectory. He's validating everyday experience and he is saying, "What you have lived, what you have experienced, it's important, it counts, it matters, and if you record it, this is what art is, that this is meaningful." Jo Reed: Why a show now about Ralph Fasanella? Leslie Umberger: We put this show up now to celebrate what would have been Ralph's 100th birthday in this coming September.  He always claimed Labor Day as his birthday.  Might have been off by a couple days, but he was happy to have that be his honorary day and really claim one that aligned him with the working people, and so we wanted to bring these pieces together and I think that the messages in his paintings are still very current and very important and they have a lot of resonance with things going on in the political fabric of America today. [Music Up] Jo Reed: That's Leslie Umberger. She curated the recent show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget. And if you're in New York City, stop by the American Folk Art Museum where you can see Lest We Forget until the end of November. You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. #### End of Ralph_Fasanella.mp3 ####