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Robert Gwathmey
Family Portrait, 1944
Gwathmey's Family Portrait presents an African American couple and six of their children within the architectural framework of a "shotgun" cabin. The stylized figures all gaze outward in disconcerting unison. At center, punctuating the painting like an exclamation point, is the significant red-and-white rectangle of a military status of the family's eldest sons. Painted during World War II, the image evokes universal home-front sentiments that transcend class and race: pride, concern, and sacrifice.
After training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the mid-1920s, Richmond-born Gwathmey commenced a distinguished career as a painter and teacher, including a long tenure at New York's Cooper Union School of Art. Family Portrait exemplifies his distinctive semiabstract style that renders subjects with flat passages of color edges with strong black lines. It also suggests the artist's enduring interest in the laboring poor. The white painter was particularly concerned with the plight of rural African Americans. In the 1950s, Gwathney's leftist politics and social-realist themes brought government persecution: nevertheless he continued to garner success in subsequent decades with his hard-hitting imagery. |