Union Organizer Reclaims a People’s Artist for the People

Ralph Fasanella grew up in an Italian immigrant family in New York City. His father was an iceman. His mother was a buttonhole maker with socialist sympathies. The Depression hit when he was a teen-ager. His father left. Fasanella became a union organizer, went to Spain to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War and returned to organize.

Around the time World War II was ending, Fasanella was trying to relieve a persistent soreness in his hand. He took a pencil and started rubbing it on paper. Bingo! He gave up union work and became an artist. He got by by pumping gas.

He painted what he knew. Colorful canvases of working class life. Family dinners. Political rallies. His father crucified on ice tongs. Subway riders. May Day. Strikes. He painted with his heart, focusing on communities where what people did for a living became the center of their world.

He became quietly respected as a “primitive” or “naive” painter, someone whose talent spoke through the sweep of his art rather than technical precision. Then in 1972 New York magazine put him on its cover, proclaiming: “This man pumps gas in the Bronx for a living. He may also be the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses.”

A year later, a union organizer named Ron Carver saw an exhibit of Fasanella’s paintings in a New York gallery. Carver’s first impulse was to try to find a way to display some of the paintings in his hometown of New Bedford, Mass., so his union members could see them. But it wasn’t until more than a decade later, in 1986, that he was able to organize a showing of 30 Fasanella paintings at a New Bedford museum.

The museum was around the corner from Carver’s office. He would go there daily on his lunch hour. “I’d leave just floating high. I was so moved and inspired.”

But he was also outraged. After all, Fasanella’s work was such a vibrant public experience, and yet virtually all of his paintings were held by private collectors, lent for exhibit only occasionally.

So, in 1988, when he was quitting his job and mulling over what union to work for next, Carver decided to make himself happy, albeit exhausted. He gave himself the next two years to raise funds to buy back some of Fasanella’s 200 paintings from collectors and place them on permanent display in city halls, parks and universities. As Fasanella had lived by pumping gas, Carver would get by by doing free-lance union consulting work.

Carver organized a New Bedford community group to buy one of a series of paintings by Fasanella commemorating a successful 1912 uprising by textile workers in Lawrence, Mass. From there, momentum started to grow. Labor leaders in a variety of states began campaigns to purchase various pictures.

The prices asked by collectors have been steep, ranging from $40,000 to $150,000, and in a number of cases collectors have refused to part with the pictures. Still, eight paintings have now been purchased or donated and are on permanent public display in Massachusetts, Michigan and Maine.

And, at 75, Ralph Fasanella is a famous artist. In New York last month, he was honored by Mayor David N. Dinkins at a reception at Gracie Mansion to begin the Immigrant Family Labor Heritage Project, established to acquire Fasanella’s “Family Supper,” a work dedicated to his parents and their tenement. The goal is to raise $130,000 to buy the painting from a New York City collector by summer’s end and exhibit it at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, due to open in the fall.

Tonight in Washington, Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) and leaders of labor and Italian-American organizations will kick off another fund-raising effort to place Fasanella’s acclaimed mural, “The Great Strike--Lawrence, 1912,” on permanent display in the U.S. Capitol as a tribute to immigrant workers.

“It’s always an uplift,” Fasanella said, struggling to describe his reaction to the wave of recognition. “But you know, what the hell, I’ve been in it so long--here I am, an old labor painter. When I painted these things, I thought they would be hanging in union halls. That’s why I made them so big--four, five, six feet. I never really painted for individuals. I was just telling the story of my life. Now, they’re going to be placed in Ellis Island, the Capitol Rotunda . . . .”

Maybe Fasanella is feeling what Ron Carver remembers feeling on the day that New Bedford dedicated a Fasanella painting.

“It was like we’d won the World Series,” said Carver, who will be returning to a regular union organizing job soon because his wife has a baby on the way. “Everyone walked around in town with a smile. That’s what all of this has been like.”