Robert Gwathmey

Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988), a white Southern artist who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, was one of the few painters of his generation to portray African Americans as people of dignity during a time of white supremacy and segregation. He saw art as a social responsibility, and this conviction shaped his practice from his earliest mature work through the remainder of his long career. Gwathmey was heavily involved in activism throughout his life, participating in the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement, joining organizations that supported racial justice and progressive social causes, and continuing to speak out publicly for these commitments even during the McCarthy era, when he was placed under FBI surveillance and briefly blacklisted for his political associations.

Gwathmey pursued his formal artistic training at North Carolina State College, the Maryland Institute of Art, and finally at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, one of the most respected American art academies of the period. In the summers of 1929 and 1930 he received Cresson Traveling Fellowships from the Pennsylvania Academy that allowed him to study art in Europe, an experience that exposed him to European modernists as well as to the traditional European paintings of the Old Masters. These transatlantic influences shaped his developing pictorial vocabulary, which would eventually combine the flattened, simplified forms of European modernism with the deeply felt subject matter of American Southern life.

Gwathmey's art was most heavily influenced by his formative years in the South. The countryside landscapes and local shops of Virginia's small towns provided the subjects for a body of work that includes cotton fields, sharecroppers at rest, tobacco pickers, Sunday churchgoers, and rural interiors filled with domestic detail. In paintings such as Feedbag and Cotton Bag, which include a bag of chicken feed and other emblems of Southern rural economy, Gwathmey captured the dignity of daily labor and the fabric of a world he knew intimately from childhood. His style, sometimes described as a distinctive American synthesis of Social Realism and modernist design, features clean contours, flattened planes of color, and carefully organized compositions that give his subjects a formal weight equal to their emotional presence.

Gwathmey taught at Cooper Union in New York from 1942 to 1968, mentoring generations of American artists over more than a quarter century. He was married to the photographer Rosalie Gwathmey, whose documentary images of the American South often informed his own painting, and he was the father of the celebrated architect Charles Gwathmey. Elected to the National Academy of Design, Gwathmey exhibited widely throughout his career, and his work is represented in major museums including the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his paintings continue to be recognized as vital contributions to the visual record of American life in the twentieth century.