Ralph Fasanella

1914-1997 · New York City, USA

Machinist, union organiser, Spanish Civil War volunteer: he painted the American working class wall-sized, and the unions bought the biggest one together.

The life

Fasanella was born in 1914 to Italian immigrants in New York, his father delivering ice, his mother working a sewing machine in the garment district. He worked as a machinist and truck driver, volunteered with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against fascism in Spain in the late 1930s, and from 1940 organised electrical workers for the UE union. He began drawing during an organising drive and took up painting in the mid-1940s, partly to ease arthritic hands. Decades of obscurity ended with a 1972 New York magazine cover, and by his death in 1997 his canvases hung in the Smithsonian and the subway itself.

The work

Hundreds of teeming oil canvases of tenements, factories, strikes, sandlot baseball and McCarthy-era menace, every window lit and every picket named. Lawrence 1912: The Great Strike, five feet by ten, was bought jointly by fifteen unions and the AFL-CIO; Subway Riders was installed in a Fifth Avenue subway station in 1995; Family Supper hangs at Ellis Island. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the American Folk Art Museum.

Why we love them

He painted labour history like it mattered as much as any coronation, because it does. Solidarity, in oils.

Go deeper

• Ralph Fasanella at the Outsider Art Fair
• Ralph Fasanella on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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