Ralph Fasanella

1914-1997

Born and raised in the Bronx until his family moved to an apartment on Sullivan Street near Washington Square Park when he was five years old, Fasanella grew up in an Italian-American working-class family. His parents immigrated to the United States in 1910, his father finding work as a longshoreman and an ice delivery truck driver, his mother raising six children and working as a sewing machine operator in Lower Manhattan's garment industry. Needless to say, the working-class milieu in which Fasanella lived and worked played a significant role in shaping the form and content of his art.  Ralph Fasanella didn't pick up a brush until the mid-1940s, when he was thirty-one years old. He came to art by way of personal and political convictions, and as postwar American cultural and political preferences swayed from progressive-conservative to conservative-liberal preferences, he sometimes found himself in favor, sometimes out of step. Yet he persevered, leaving an impressive body of several hundred canvases, many sketches, and broad respect and admiration from multiple spheres, including art and labor. The city is the inspiration for much of Fasanella’s art.  He portrays the everyday life and struggle of the working class in New York from the early years of the century until more recent times.  Sweatshops, immigrants, and different ethnic groups, politics, injustice, the good and bad – all are subjects for his paintings.  Fasanella’s paintings are stories shown in amazing detail, he manages to capture the oppressive side of a technological society in which the urban landscape crushes the working man.  Fasanella makes preliminary studies for his works and then paints with oils on canvas. – Andrew Edlin Gallery & Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists

Check out this 1992 Ralph Fasanella Documentary from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It’s a 23 minute video by Glen Pearcy & narrated by Julian Bond.