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RALPH FASANELLA (AMERICAN 1914-1997) Lawrence 1912 / Working the Night Shift #2 (Mill Workers), 1978 oil on canvas 92 x 137 cm (36 1/8 x 54 in.) framed dimensions: 95 x 142 x 5 cm (37 3/8 x 56 x 2 in.) signed and dated lower right PROVENANCE Private Collection, New York (acquired from the family of the artist) EXHIBITED ACA Galleries, New York (label on verso) Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York LITERATURE Marc Fasanella, Leslie Umberger, and Paul D'Amrosio, Ralph Fasanella: Images of Optimism, Portland: Pomengrate, 2017 (illustrated on page 83) LOT NOTES We are grateful to the artist's son, Marc Fasanella, for allowing us to reproduce the following essay from his book, Ralph Fasanella: Images of Optimism The story goes that when my father was experiencing a creative slump, he visited Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts, on the advice of a friend . Truth be told, I think my parents needed some time apart. A decade had passed since we had moved out of the city to Westchester County, and my father could not stomach the suburbs. It was 1975; Ralph was sixty years old and had retired from running the gas station. Spending time in the New England mill towns with people who struggled for a living brought him back in touch with why he had become a labor activist in the 1930s, why he had fought against Franco in Spain, and why he had so much passion for the working class. He came home on weekends to see my sister and me, and eventually he brought me to the mills to see what had been engaging his mind for months, what had become his passion. He seemed to know everybody in Lawrence and Lowell, like he was a native of the towns, and he had easy access to anyplace he wanted to show me. He would greet someone with a "Hey, Moe!" With a "Hey, Ralph" in response, we would be granted free rein of the mills, some operating illegally with equipment that seemed to date from a previous century. My father was an exceptional guy. My mother always said that if he got on a crowded elevator, by the time he reached the fifth floor he knew everyone in the car and would most likely keep in contact with at least one of them. In any situation, in any environment, he would find a way to talk to people. With workers there was an instant bond. They could tell he was one of them, a guy with dirty fingernails, a pockmarked face, a jiving sense of humor, and deep empathy and appreciation for the work they were doing. He was smart, well read, and articulate, and he wasn't going to get anyone get into trouble on his account. Management knew it was better to give him free rein than to find a reason to prevent him from seeing what he wanted to see. What was the harm in letting a working class artist wander around, talk to people, and sketch? So, as an adolescent I walked the floor of the mills, met the workers, experienced the deafening noise of textile factory machines and the exhausting pace of industrial production, and breathed in air thick with cotton dust. oil, and sweat. l felt the massive scale of brick buildings weigh on me, the years of toil worn into the floorboards beneath me. We spent hours that blended into days studying the mills, their architecture, the networks of canals used to power the booming nineteenth-century textile industry of Massachusetts. The noise and the heavy air that permeated my skin remain within my memory today. When I studied art and architecture in graduate school, I thought it would be important to construct an installation that could expose the visceral, wearying, and enervating experience of work in the mills to museumgoers, but I was also drawn to the beauty I saw in the inanimate components of the mill: the endless expanses of brick wall punctuated by a repetitive pattern of huge windows and massive beams or posts, the wpil-worn machines and the ingenious design of their interchangeable parts. I drew floor plans and elevations, selected materials, and conceived of an audio experience. (My installation never materialized.) I had observed all of the same darkness as my father did, but where I saw a relic he perceived a living opera populated with a cast of engaging characters whose lives he wanted to know. His senses were alive and open to every vibration. He could absorb every last detail of the factory as a collective entity as well as appreciate each and every soul who occupied it. He loved them in the same way he loved me. He wanted to know their stories. In just the briefest of moments he could engage them, making them chuckle and offering his thoughts as he listened to theirs. He so enjoyed their company, he often invited them out for coffee or to share a cigarette. He could spend the day talking and sketching obsessively. His hands were an extension of his eyes, ears, nose, and throat- they helped him perceive. The thousands of sketches he produced were moments of reflection and analyses of the ways people were sitting, how energetic or tired they looked, how much of life was recorded in their hands and their shoes, how they occupied the space around them. My father saturated himself with the environment of the mills and their workers. His many years as a union organizer and activist drew him deeply into the study of their history: the struggle for a worldwide union in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as the 1912 Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, which was remarkable in its ability to bring together immigrant workers from so many disparate cultures and for the prescient placement of women at the head of the picket lines and in leadership roles. He made every effort he could to analyze  and record the many the salient elements of the momentous changes that took place during 1912. He spoke for countless hours with current mill workers, retired mill workers, and the children and grandchildren of mill workers, and with historians, politicians, and the owners and staff of the eateries where these people congregated. In the same way that he painted-feeling his way forward, letting the evolution of the canvas reveal new insights to him-he started assembling materials. His studio became cluttered with books about Lawrence, Lowell, and the history of the labor movement in Massachusetts. He met historians, folk musicians, and songwriters who knew the stories and songs of the picket lines from 1912; he brought home their recordings and listened to them repeatedly. Into the studio came spools and bobbins, copies of articles, photographs, etchings, political buttons, and banners-any ephemera he could put his hands on and stuff in his pockets that connected him with his experiences in the mill towns. And then he began to paint. He stretched large canvases eight feet across, and then even larger ones, the biggest he produced in his lifetime. They had to be big to contain his thoughts, to record the history that he had so clearly formed in his mind's eye. He primed his canvases with gesso and drew large, dynamic abstract compositions with charcoal. They didn't make any sense to me at the time, but, looking back, it is clear that he had absorbed and understood much of the abstract art that was the vanguard of his day. He knew how to craft a dynamic allover composition; he could convey space and time, but pure abstraction just wasn't his art He needed to include narrative. Ralph filled in the charcoal compositions with washes of brick red, turquoise, and yellow umber. and he began to work up the details of the strike and its people one by one: the important buildings, the canals, judicial system, commons, mill workers, security guards, strikers, and National Guardsmen. He packed as much as he could into each large canvas, altering the perspective and the scale as necessary in order to tell the story. His motifs are similar to the stained-glass windows that hantued him from his internment in the Catholic protectory, but where church Windows were often singular in their message, his canvases were multifaceted; where the stained glass offered a moody respite from the darkness and sins of the church, his paintings were bright and full of air, inspired by the French impressionists. He worked on several canvases at a time, and when he was stuck on how to resolve a particular aspect of a large encyclopedic panorama, he set it aside and painted smaller, more peaceful scenes of solitary buildings and their looming, melancholy presence in the night sky. After his experience in Lawrence and Lowell, Ralph spent some time in the North End of Boston. He met wonderful people and became a fixture in the local cafes and union halls, but he never found the compelling truths he relished from his experiences in the Massachusetts mill towns. As the political winds brought the country into the Reagan-Bush era, my father searched for a firm footing while the struggles of his time became anathemas. The luncheonettes were overtaken by food franchises, and new methods of communication and retailing began to take hold. My father strove to incorporate these changes into his paintings, but the stories did not have the depth, the force, the universal meaning encapsulated in The Great Strike (IWW Textile Strike) (1978; pp. 86- 87). Though he painted many small, beautiful paintings after his time in Lawrence, in the last two decades of his life he wrestled with the formation of his last two large canvases. For a Spanish Civil War painting he never completed, he sketched a composition on drawing paper, stretched a large canvas, drew a charcoal composition on it, and then stopped. He chronicled the Reagan years in a large canvas titled Ron's Rollin' (1985; pp. 90-91). The painting is dynamic and filled with visual metaphor, but it feels unresolved, with simple colors that produce a somewhat flat sense of depth. For a painting about the collapse of the Soviet Union, he created a large triptych, but its minor details were finished by an assistant after his death. The Lawrence series remains some of his most important work and the largest body of work created around a central theme. In the Lawrence period, he was decidedly his own man, released from the demands of earning a living and surrounded by working-class and progressive, freethinking people. He could truly follow his muse, be wholly guided by his insights, and let his powerful sense of perception draw him into a period of intense intellectual development and production. On those trips with Ralph to the mill towns, I observed him conduct his research, and I watched him paint. I came to know who my father was-beyond his role as parent. I spent unstructured time with him, listening to him speak to people. The way he utilized all of his senses and put his perceptions on canvas opened my mind to the aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, and sensuous depth of the world around me. I learned how to use not only my eyes and ears to observe but also my nose, tongue, fingers, intellectual curiosity, reasoning, and emotional senses-my belly, as he would say. These are skills that have enriched my life. They can bring as much melancholy as they do joy, but they provide great depth to what can otherwise be a very shallow existence. The mill series remains relevant to the present day, to the human condition. Its stories outrage, inspire, enliven; they give cause for continued activism as well as celebration. If life is to be more than just a struggle for daily bread interspersed with brief moments of material gratification, if living is to be imbued fully with the sensations brought by smelling the roses and feeling the sting of the thorns, then we need art; the human community needs to live a more complete, artful life. We need not only bread but roses too. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Ralph Fasanella was born in 1914 in the Bronx, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. His father, an ice delivery man, and his mother, a garment worker and union activist, instilled in him a profound respect for labor and community - values that would define his life’s work. After leaving school at a young age, Fasanella worked various jobs, including as a truck driver and union organizer, before discovering painting as a form of self-expression and social reflection in the mid-1940s. Entirely self-taught, Fasanella developed a distinctive style characterized by dense compositions, bold color, and a tapestry-like treatment of urban space. His paintings - depicting picket lines, tenement neighborhoods, factories, baseball games, and city celebrations - became visual chronicles of mid-20th-century working-class life. He aligned himself with America’s populist and social realist traditions, echoing the spirit of artists like Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence, but with a uniquely personal and communal perspective. By the 1970s, Fasanella had achieved national recognition as a voice of “people’s art.” His work was championed by labor organizations and exhibited in major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum, affirming his legacy as one of the most important self-taught painters of the 20th century. CONDITION Observed in frame, the work is in very good condition. UV light inspection showed no signs of restoration. N.B. Condition reports are available upon request. All lots are sold in as-is condition at the time of sale. Please note that any condition statement regarding works of art is given as a courtesy to our clients in order to assist them in assessing the condition. The report is a genuine opinion held by Shapiro Auctions and should not be treated as a statement of fact. The absence of a condition report or a photograph does not preclude the absence of defects or restoration, nor does a reference to particular defects imply the absence of any others. Shapiro Auctions, LLC., including its consultants and agents, shall have no responsibility for any error or omission. Keywords: Outsider art, folk art painting, self-taught Artist, New York City, Manhattan