Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer
by Michael Kammen

$49.95 hardcover
$24.95 paperback

   



In 1988, the New York Times obituary for Robert Gwathmey described the Social Realist painter as "an artist of social passions and style." Gwathmey is perhaps best remembered as the first white American painter to depict African Americans in an unromanticized manner.

Robert Gwathmey was a leading member of the Social Realist movement that flourished from the 1930s through the 1950s. Like his fellow Social Realists, Gwathmey sought to use his art to expose privilege and pretense, demand social justice, and call for major changes in the prevailing socioeconomic system.

Gwathmey's most enduring and memorable subject matter was African American life in the rural South. He showed the inherent dignity of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, but without sentimentalism. He strongly affirmed the significance of community and the cohesion of family life in Black culture. In his art he emphasized the characteristic architecture of country towns and the lively posters advertising elixirs and the circus that were plastered on barns in the rural South. He also became a master of the still life, painting field flowers and what he liked to call "vegetation."

Gwathmey's unique style utilized a deliberate two-dimensionality highlighted with deep and vivid colors, like those used in the medieval stained glass that he so admired.

Gwathmey was an eighth-generation Virginian of Welsh heritage who repeated on numerous occasions that his principal concerns were the human figure and the human condition. As a lifelong activist against injustice, he was kept under surveillance by the FBI for nearly thirty years. Using Gwathmey's FBI file, along with numerous interviews and archival records, Kammen crafts a compelling portrait of an engaging American painter in the midst of dramatic social and political change.

Michael Kammen is the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University. He is author or editor of more than twenty books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning People of Paradox.

Profile of Michael Kammen


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