Robert Gwathmey

B. Richmond, VA, 1903
D. Southampton, NY, 1988

Robert Gwathmey was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. In 1926 he moved to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. While in school he received two William Emlen Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarships and traveled extensively throughout Europe. During his time overseas he looked closely at the European modernists and was especially drawn to the works of Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Rufino Tamayo. At the Pennsylvania Academy, he also met fellow southerner, photographer Rosalie Hook who he later married in 1935.

Gwathmey graduated in 1930 and moved to New York where he accepted a teaching position at the Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan and taught there for twenty-six years. Two of his students were the painter Faith Ringgold and the comic strip illustrator Alvin Carl Hollingsworth. In his early years teaching Gwathmey received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship which he used to live and work with African American tobacco farmers in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. This became a pivotal experience for Gwathmey and is where he began to focus in on the style and subjects that would define his painting career.

Much of Gwathmey's social realist oeuvre depicts rural Southern life and the plight of African Americans. As a lifelong social activist, Gwathmey believed that artistic expression and social issues could not be separated. During WWII, Gwathmey became active in Artists for Victory, an organization of artist’s whose mission was to assist the war effort. He spent much of his life committed to civil rights, workers’ rights and the peace movement.

In Michael Kammen's book Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer he writes, "In 1974, however, nine years after the Moynihan report stressed the "single-headed" black family as not merely a terrible legacy of slavery but a pathological situation in contemporary society, Gwathmey painted Father and Child. It is a complex and fascinating work that puts the paternal role as a responsible parent front and center, survivor of an Old South that has been shattered, symbolized by the toppled statue of Johnny Reb (the Confederate soldier), replaced by the ubiquitous black crow, a wrecked car, and a woebegone shops. To the left of the loving father is Gwathmey himself (also a loving father) holding up a peace sign with a cluster of people of both races behind him, unified spatially and by the social demonstration they are supporting. If it is a picture of protest, the forces of good appear to have triumphed over regional myths of racial hierarchy and domination. The outlandish color combinations, a salmon sky above a lavender foreground, are vintage Gwathmey." (p. 165)

Gwathmey was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters and to the National Academy of Design. His work is included in many public and private collections throughout the United States, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, National Academy of Design, and the Library of Congress. His work has been shown at the Butler Museum of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, the Telfair Art Museum in Savannah, Georgia, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, as well as the Virginia Historical Society in the artist’s native Richmond.

Despite declining health and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, Gwathmey continued to paint until four years before his death in 1988.