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American artist Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) was a leading member of the Social Realist movement that flourished from the 1930s through the 1950s. Like his fellow Social Realists, Gwathmey used his art to expose privilege and pretense, demand social justice, and call for major changes in the prevailing socioeconomic system. Gwathmey was an eighth-generation Virginian, and throughout his life his main artistic themes were race relations and his native South. He is perhaps best remembered as the first white American painter to depict African Americans in an unromanticized, respectful manner. Using a unique style that combined a deliberate two-dimensional flatness with deep and vivid colors, Gwathmey illuminated the inherent dignity of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were his subjects. As a lifelong activist against injustice, Gwathmey was kept under surveillance by the FBI for nearly thirty years. Using Gwathmey's FBI file, along with numerous interviews and archival records, Michael Kammen crafts a compelling portrait of an engaging American painter in the midst of dramatic social and political change. The publication of this book coincides with the first major retrospective of Gwathmey's work, which will open in September at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. In November, the exhibition will move to the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it will then travel to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Augusta, Georgia, and the Museum of American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

"Kammen, a social historian, is most effective at positioning Gwathmey in his cultural frame....He establishes artistic connections between Gwathmey and the French realists....One of the pleasant surprises of the book is its brief glimpse into the work of his wife, Rosalie, who made a series of documentary photographs in the 40's of African-American communities in North Carolina, where the Gwathmeys spent their summers, that resemble his work in subject matter and composition."

John Beardsley, New York Times, 10/17/1999

"ROBERT GWATHMEY surveys the work of a prominent social realist, Southern-born, a white man who took as his main subject the lives of African Americans and portrayed them without romanticizing or caricaturing."

Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World, 1/9/2000

Robert Gwathmey the Life and Art of a Passionate Observer: The Life and Art of Robert Gwathmey: Search Results