American Italians in Art

Ralph Fasanella

Frank Stella

Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997)
Painter of the working people

Ralph Fasanella died three years ago on December 16, 1997. He was born to Italian immigrants from the province of Bari, Puglia on Labor Day in 1914. That's fitting, since, today, posters of Fasanella's paintings are found in more union halls and workers' homes.
     His mother, Ginevra, a buttonhole maker and shop steward in the clothing industry, "taught me never to bait people because of color or religion or where they came from." Joe, his father, a teamster and later an iceman, taught him to "shape up," work hard, and keep at it.
Fasanella fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He also served in the U.S. Navy. He became a United Electrical Workers (UE) Local 1227 member while working at the Morey Machine shop in Brooklyn. In 1938, he became an organizer for various unions under the CIO. "I always thought that you, as a worker, had to get your share," he says. "Organizing was a way to take on the capitalists. When the auto workers had their sit-down strikes, it was the stirring of America."
     It was during a UE organizing drive that Ralph, out of restlessness, began to draw. "A few things came out and I was getting excited about it." When a friend suggested that he become a painter, Fasanella, now over thirty years old, found his future. His 1948 painting May Day, "just came out of my belly. I never planned it. I don't know how I did it." The painting shows people of all colors and kinds streaming out of the streets and tenements of New York marching together through Union Square.
     McCarthy-era blacklisting left Fasanella unable to find work. He supported himself by pumping gas at his brother’s garage in the Bronx until his rediscovery in 1972. In October of that year he appeared on the cover of New York magazine which magazine devoted eight pages to the artist and his scenes of working-class life, a major theme on which his reputation is built.
     His enormous canvases were filled with vibrant city scenes, Yankee baseball games, Coney Island and the subway at rush hour. He also depicted such significant events as the funeral of New York’s congressman, Vito Marcantonio, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Fasanella quickly gained a reputation as the "greatest American primitive painter since Grandma Moses."
     The artist spent three years in Lawrence, Mass. in the 1970s gathering material for a series of paintings on the city’s labor history, especially the 1912 "Bread and Roses Strike" of more than 20,000 immigrant textile workers. Life was not easy for the artist in Lawrence. He lived in an $18 a week room at the YMCA while completeing 18 canvases including the famed 5x10-foot painting, "Lawrence 1912: The Great Strike."
     The large canvas was purchased with donations from 15 unions and given to Congress, where it hung for years in the Rayburn Office Building hearing room of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education.
     Following the 1994 elections, the new Republican majority in Congress eliminated "labor" from the committee’s name and Fasanella’s painting from the committee’s hearing room. Removing the painting, he said, "was a sign of the potency of the labor movement. The painting was a visual history of the labor experience and the Republicans couldn't stand it.
     They were ready to bury the labor movement of this country. It was a sign of weakness that they had to bury the truth." A Boston Sunday Globe editorial on Sept. 10, 1995 said the Republican staffer who ordered the removal of the painting had "little grasp of history and even less of art." "Bread and Roses -- Lawrence 1912" now hangs in Flint, Michigan at the Labor and Learning Center. According to Eva Fasanella, the artist’s widow and business manager, "Lawrence 1912" had been the only labor painting in the Capitol.
Fasanella’s 1950 painting "Subway Riders" was installed in the subway station at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, one of the few oil paintings in the world permanently on view in a public transportation center.
     In the late 1980s, Ralph and his wife, poster publisher, and partner, Eva, began an initiative called Public Domain to place Fasanella paintings in public places. Today, as a result, visitors to the Great Hall at Ellis Island in New York Harbor can see "Family Supper." In addition, "May Day" is in the James Fenimore Cooper Museum in Cooperstown, New York. "Subway Riders" is the only oil painting permanently installed in the New York City subway. This painting is on display at the Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street stop of the E and F trains in Manhattan.
"In this society you have to get up and fight for the betterment of mankind," says Fasanella. "The people who fought for mankind are my heroes."

FRANK STELLA (1936 -    )
An American painter

he abstractionist painter Frank (Philip) Stella’s recent residency at the Phillips Academy in Andover, his alma mater, illustrates why the 62-year-old Malden-born painter ranks among America's most famous living artists. (Not to be confused with Frank D. Stella, the chairman of F.D. Stella Products Co. and chairman of the National Italian American Foundation).
     Stella returned to his alma mater recently to lecture, discuss his art with students and present the public with a stunning array of works he made in collaboration with printer-publisher Kenneth Tyler. The show at the Addison Gallery of American Art on the Academy campus, entitled "Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics: A Unique Collaboration" ended on January 3, 1999 and was featured on WGBH's Greater Arts Boston.
     Stella was born on May 12, 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts from first-generation American parents (his paternal grandparents were Sicilian and his maternal, Calabrian). His father, Frank, was a gynecologist in Malden, who worked his way through medical school by painting department store interiors. He viewed painting as an avocation, not a career. He sent his son, Frank, the eldest of three children, to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for a good education that would prepare him for a respectable profession. There, in a studio art program that provided students with unlimited supplies of materials and great freedom to experiment, Frank began to paint.
     ''I knew how to paint before I got here,'' he says of his Andover stay. ''My mother went to art school. And my father made me paint the house. He once said his goal was to make paint ''look as good as it was in the can''; the works in his 1960 ''Benjamin Moore'' series were all made with that brand of house paint, which produced a slick, bouncy surface and eliminated pictorial depth.
     His father (with whom he remained close until his death in 1979) encouraged him to go to the college of his choice, but said the only three he would pay for were Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Stella chose Princeton for its proximity to New York post-Abstract Expressionist art scene.
     Stella bypassed Boston. ''I've never been a favorite son of the Boston area,'' he says. He recalls the MFA's selling off a major work of his; a museum spokesperson says the MFA has never owned one. The point isn't which side is right. It's that a major American artist feels his hometown hasn't supported him sufficiently. He also recalls that Boston's Federal Reserve Bank covered a big work of his with a temporary wall, and on it hung small paintings ''by my mother and her Rockport friends'' (he also adds that his mother, Constance Stella, who lives in Ipswich, has sold more paintings this year than he has). He's had a happier experience with MIT, which is home to two major Stellas. His 1988 ''Heads or Tails,'' an acrylic and enamel on aluminum work with aquatic references, is in the entrance to the Tang Center of the Sloan School of Management. His 1994 ''Loohooloo'' fills all four walls of a specially designed conference room in the Department of Architecture. Ninety-seven feet long and projecting up to 46 inches away from the wall, it is a complete environment that Stella compares with the one Monet created with his huge waterlily murals in the Orangerie in Paris.
     Right after his 1958 graduation from Princeton, Stella moved to New York, where he's been based ever since. ''It's not a restful place,'' he says. ''But I don't know how to function anywhere else. I don't want to live on some farm in Vermont.'' In the summer of 1959, Leo Castelli, the Italian-born art dealer already showing Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, invited the 23-year-old Stella to be on his gallery's roster of cutting-edge artists. Stella's fresh approach continued to develop. Using metallic paint on geometrically shaped canvases, he did groups in aluminum, copper and purple. Sticking with stripes and Benjamin Moore house paint, he began using brighter colors for a series of Concentric Squares and Mitered Mazes in 1962-63.
     His compositions became curvilinear with his Protractor Series, begun in 1967. In the 1970s, the Polish Village paintings were named after synagogues that had been destroyed in Poland by the Nazis. Stella then began etching and painting brightly patterned metal reliefs known as the Brazilian Series, Exotic Birds works and Indian Birds works. His Cones and Pillars were metal reliefs in those shapes with Italian titles from Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales. Chapter titles from Moby Dick identify a late 1980s series of mixed-media abstract constructions and lithographs with a lot of wave imagery.
     Stella's interest in and appreciation of the Baroque were confirmed during a tenure in Rome in the winter of 1982-83. He loves sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian painting, particularly that of Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Of the two Caravaggio fascinated him more. He asked, "Can we find a mode of pictorial expression that will do for abstraction now what Caravaggio's pictorial genius did for sixteenth-century naturalism and its magnificent successors?" [See article on Caravaggio Exhibit at Boston College]. Stella uses the crisis of representational art in sixteenth-century Italy to illuminate the crisis of abstraction in our time.
     In 1983, Harvard named him Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, an honor previously bestowed on such artists as Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Bernstein, Luciano Berio, and Italo Calvino.
     Frank Stella is a unique artist. He struggled with issues which had placed abstract art in a standstill after Mondrian, and looked back to the sixteenth century for solutions. Stella is influenced by the Baroque period, because of parallel situations, but also because of the creation of space. Large-scale pieces of Stella's work grace corporate spaces around the globe, including Saatchi & Saatchi's New York lobby and the outside wall of Pacific Bell in Los Angeles. He explains it this way: "But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."