Ralph Fasanella was born to Joseph and Ginevra (Spagnoletti), Italian immigrants, in the Bronx on Labor Day in 1914.
His mother worked in a neighborhood dress shop drilling holes into buttons, and spent her spare time as an anti-fascist activist.
"Fasanella later said that the compositional density of his pictures was influenced by the experience of helping his father deliver ice, which involved removing all the food from customers' refrigerators and arranging it in neatly ordered stacks.
[2] These experiences instilled a deep dislike for authority and reinforced Fasanella's hatred for anything which broke people's spirits.
The melancholy image features rows of boys standing at attention, watched over by scowling, ominous-looking priests.
He became a member of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1227 while working as a machinist in Brooklyn.
After the Spanish Civil War, Fasanella returned to the United States, where he began organizing labor unions.
Fasanella's painting focused on city life, men and women at work, union meetings, strikes, sit-ins and baseball games.
Fasanella's opinionated, leftist-oriented artwork caused him to be blacklisted among art dealers and galleries during the McCarthy era.
Critic John Berger agreed, pointing out Fasanella's left-liberal critique of urban living, "the violence of the daily necessity of the streets .. the way that the density of the working population makes itself felt.
"[1] In 1972 he appeared in a major interview, with anchor Patrick Watson, on WNET Channel XIII's groundbreaking newshour The Fifty-First State.
This led to the publishers Alfred Knopf and Company, under chief editor Robert Gottlieb, to commission Watson to write the book Fasanella's City, which was richly produced, with superb four-colour reproductions of the artist's work.
A large number of exhibits traveled the U.S. His work brought new respect for folk, urban and working-class art, and encouraged the emerging field of labor culture studies.
He also produced a painting of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and violent, blood-red image of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It was loaned to the United States Congress, where it hung for years in the Rayburn Office Building in the hearing room of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education.
Following the 1994 elections, a staffer for the new Republican majority in Congress had the painting removed from the hearing room and returned to the owners.
"[2] It quickly became apparent that much of the public fascination for Fasanella's work had relied on the political and socio-economic messages they contained rather than their artistic appeal.
As he told one reporter: "The other day, I called an old lefty pal at 1199 (the drug and hospital workers' union) and offered them my stuff.
In a press release regarding his death, John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, declared Fasanella to be "a true artist of the people in the tradition of Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie.
But his supporters point to the "anger, anxiety and agitation" which can be found not only in some of the subjects he depicts (strikes, sit-ins) but in the subtle details of his canvases (such as the angry marchers in his May Day).