Robert Gwathmey; Artist, Activist

Robert Gwathmey, 85, whose brightly colored depictions of sharecroppers and migrant workers made him a leading artist of social realism. An artist working in New York City but a native of the South with a special interest in the rural portions of that area, Gwathmey was active in campaigns for artists’ rights and for wider social issues while working with such colleagues as Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, Romare Bearden and Raphael and Moses Soyer. Gwathmey picketed against sweatshop conditions in New York City in 1949 and organized an auction to benefit a small Long Island art museum in 1975. In 1966, he asked his son, architect Charles Gwathmey, to design what became a landmark in American residential architecture, a house in the Long Island community of Amagansett made up of cubistic forms. In Southhampton, N.Y., on Wednesday of Parkinson’s disease.