Non-Fiction By Robert Gwathmey

Non-Fiction

Robert Gwathmey: Non-Fiction

by Kitty Jospe

Stop to examine the painting Non-Fiction.  There is something unsettling about the bright orange and yellow harlequin whose form contrasts sharply with the soft lines of the peach and white clothes that drape the dark-skinned children. They stare out at us from the painting, ignoring the barbed wire that winds ominously around the barefoot girl’s feet.

The minstrel cutout is no happy comedic character, waiting to be animated.  Rather, the yellow triangle shoes dangle at unnatural angles, and the ghostly hands give an eerie impression.  Where are the strings on the banjo?  What is the story behind this empty suit with a dashing handlebar bowtie and smiling pepsodent-white collar?  Does the artist give us a clue to interpret the upturned horseshoe?  According to Michael Kammen¹ Gwathmey loved to play horseshoes, and “ultimately, for purposes of this iconic image, we see an unsubtle symbol of good luck ironically placed.”

You might like to compare our oil painting with a 1945 screen print of the same title in the Goldstein collection, “Art and the People” in Washington. That label reads: “Born in Richmond, Virginia, Robert Gwathmey drew upon his experience as a child in the South in his artistic portrayals of white and black sharecroppers. In 1944 he received a grant that permitted him to work with sharecroppers on a tobacco farm, experiencing firsthand the realities of their daily lives.”

Gawthmey’s painting is an invitation to find out more about the multi-faceted truth of the South and the stark reality of sharecropping. For instance, the young girl is holding a baby, but in reality an adult would be out in the fields working.

It is clear that Gwathmey is juxtaposing presence versus absence, real people as opposed to fictional.  The child on the young girl’s left hip mimics the empty banjo on the harlequin’s hip. The pins that hold together the stiff elbows, knees and one shoulder of the cut-out speak of artifice, contrasting with very real children.  The girl’s bare feet, caught in metaphorical snags of barbed wire, echo the snare of those working in the fields, with no hope of escaping a system that keeps them enslaved to a backbreaking future and inescapable debt. 

Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) was an 8^th-generation Virginian, gifted artist and humanist.  His father, a railroad engineer, met a tragic death in a train accident eight months

before Robert was born.  One biography attributes the artist’s keen awareness of social injustice to his youth working part-time jobs.  He landed at the Philadelphia School of Fine Arts in 1926, and won a scholarship to travel to Europe in 1929-30. By 1930, with characteristic humor, he saw the end of his studies as “another way to join the ranks of the unemployed, in these years of the Depression.”                                           

                   

In art school he was influenced by Honoré Daumier’s satiric work and caricatures, but after his experience in Europe, he declared Gothic art his favorite.  Dr. Kammen in MAG’s Seeing America mentions the additional influences of the Barbizon artist Jean-François Millet, known for his paintings of humble peasants.²  He was also drawn to Rouault's use of color and Picasso's experimentation. Some of his paintings reveal his admiration for Cubism.  But above all, he is known for his ability to render “humanity where others could not avoid distinctions of race or class, sectional myths or parochial stereotypes."

In 1968, the year that he retired from teaching at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, Gwathmey explained why he never used chiaroscuro in his art. "I was raised in Tidewater, Virginia, there where the land is flat and the roads are wide. That's where I had all of my good times. And there you see everything in silhouette. You see a tree from its roots up to the topmost leaf. Whereas in some other part of the land, the Piedmont or the mountains, you would have, we'll say, a backdrop of landscape, a mountain as it were."³

Non-Fiction, currently hanging in our American collection, has a striking use of color, which creates a vivid two-dimensional scene without shadows or shadings. It perfectly underlines the stark truth of the title.