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