Robert Gwathmey was arguably the first white artist—and an eighth-generation Virginian, no less--to paint Southern blacks in a dignified and empathetic way. As a social realist painter, he fought a life-long battle against racism, militarism, and the economic exploitation of the poor. His commitment earned him more than two decades of surveillance by the F.B.I. Yet in the twenty-first century, his status as a white painter who depicted rural life, and especially the plight of African Americans in the southern United States, tended to depress his reputation. This is a shame because he retains an unmistakable and captivating style coupled with a compelling concern for social justice.
Robert Gwathmey was born in Richmond to Robert Gwathmey Sr. (1866-1902) and Eva Harrison (1868-1941). Robert Sr., a railroad engineer, was killed by an explosion at work before his son was even born. Robert Jr. took business courses at North Carolina State College in Raleigh in 1924-25. Finding college unfulfilling, Gwathmey briefly shipped aboard a freighter and then studied for a year at the Maryland Institute of Design. Between 1926 and 1930, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, studying with Franklin Watkins, George Harding, and Daniel Garber.
In 1929, Gwathmey won the Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which allowed him to study in Europe for two summers. When he returned in 1930, he taught for seven years at Beaver [now Arcadia] College in Glenside, a girl’s school in a suburb of Philadelphia. In these years, Gwathmey became involved with several organizations concerned with the difficulties of workers in the Great Depression. At the same time, he met photographer Rosalie Hook whom he married in 1935. Their son, Charles (1938-2009), became an extremely successful architect.
Gwathmey’s artistic career developed very slowly—he later destroyed virtually all his early work--until he developed his distinctive style during the 1940s. A sympathetic observer of people, Gwathmey adapted abstraction to depict racial and class issues in the southern United States and to portray African Americans in a positive manner. By 1950, he had a national reputation.
Gwathmey used emphatic black lines to outline figures and create bold geometric shapes which he filled with flat planes of vibrant color. The result created paintings reminiscent of stained glass. “I am more interested in the two-dimensional than the three dimensional,” Gwathmey said. His best-known works are characterized by simplified forms and the use of symbolic abstraction to create a message. Patterns in clothing, seed bags, and advertising signs help to animate the painting’s surface.
Gwathmey walked a fine line; his work contained social and moral messages but he never drifted into didacticism or preachiness. His paintings of agrarian laborers, regardless of skin color, avoided sentimentalism. His workers were never picturesque, but retained an unromanticized dignity. Some of his work now resembles history painting, capturing a bygone moment of rural southern life and culture.
His scathing pictorial attacks on the demagogues and idle upper class of the southern United States, and his compassionate portrayal of black sharecroppers, earned him great popularity among northern liberals. They also drew the ire of the U.S. government; the F.B.I. followed Gwathmey regularly from 1942-69, noting his membership in various left-wing humanitarian, labor, and civil liberties organizations.
Famously gregarious and a noted storyteller, Gwathmey formed close relationships with other social realists such as Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, and especially Philip Evergood. Gwathmey taught at several colleges, most notably at Cooper Union in New York City from 1942-68. After his retirement, he settled with his wife in Amagansett on Long Island in a famous house and studio designed by his son. Other than a brief teaching job at Boston University, Gwathmey spent the next twenty years concentrating on his artwork and political activism. He participated in the Civil Rights movement, opposed the U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, and remained committed to workers’ rights. Despite developing Parkinson’s disease, he continued to paint until four years before his death in 1988.
Gwathmey’s career peaked in the 1940s, overlapping the rise of abstract expressionism, but he remained a representational artist for his entire career. He believed abstractionists acted foolishly by disregarding the realities of modern life. He admired the way many abstract expressionists used colors but ultimately was unimpressed. He later said, “I’m interested in the image; I still am. And they are not.”
In 1953, Gwathmey joined several figural artists to create Reality magazine to protest against the new movement. He was discouraged by the repressive and intimidating atmosphere of the 1950s, the harassment by the F.B.I., and the declining audience for his socially engaged realism. After the 1950s, he felt alienated from the dominant forces in the art world as abstract expressionism and then pop art, op art, minimalism, and conceptual art transfixed critics, museums, and popular attention.
Although Gwathmey continued to create socially conscious work after 1960, he explored other subject matter such as musicians, carefully choreographed paintings of flowers, and the vegetation of eastern Long Island. He also began to create figures whose racial identity was not immediately evident. Critics noticed the subtle change, implying that his earlier work conveyed his anger more effectively and displayed a tighter focus on social injustice.
In his career, Gwathmey enjoyed the support and friendship of African American artists such as Paul Robeson and Jacob Lawrence. In the catalogue of a one-man exhibition of Gwathmey’s work at the ACA Gallery in New York in 1946, Robeson wrote, ''In the coming years, when as we all hope, true equality and the brotherhood of man will be a reality, Gwathmey’s paintings will have earned him the right to feel that he has shared in the shaping of a better world.''
Gwathmey and Jacob Lawrence were friends from the late 1940s and Gwathmey persuaded Lawrence in 1962 to be represented by his dealer, Terry Dintenfass. Gwathmey enjoyed being called the “white Jacob Lawrence”—they both utilized flat areas of color and shallow picture space. Yet Gwathmey sometimes was attacked by black leaders in the 1970s as a white painter who inaccurately portrayed, and even co-opted, the plight of African Americans.
Some of the residue of this attitude persists in the twenty-first century as Gwathmey’s reputation continues to languish compared to both his social realist and abstract expressionist contemporaries. But Gwathmey was ultimately content with the body of his work. At the end of his career, he declared, “I’m just as interested in composition, color, and surface as I am in subject matter…. But things are what they are an as an observer, I paint what I see.”