Vendor
1979 · Color screenprint on cream wove paper
Image: 74.7 × 56.1 cm (29 7/16 × 22 1/8 in.); Sheet: 83.5 × 66 cm (32 7/8 × 26 in.)
Art Institute of Chicago
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Robert Gwathmey
American, 1903
Manchester, VA, USA
PaintingRealismSocial Realism
Representation
None documented
5
Institutional Exhibitions
13
Works in Collection
20
Assets Indexed
4
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
90%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Movements
- • Realism
- • Social Realism
Related Artists
No edges recorded
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
American Prints: 1913�1963
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1974–1975
No image
American Prints of the 20th Century
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1954
No image
Some American Prints, 1949�50, from the Museum Collection
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1951
No image
Recent Acquisitions
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1950
No image
PM Competition: The Artist as Reporter
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1940
About
Why this artist matters now
Robert Gwathmey was an American painter whose social realist works addressed racial injustice and labor conditions in the rural South during the post-war era. Working primarily in oil on canvas, he depicted sharecroppers, cotton fields, and scenes of everyday life with a formal restraint that balanced documentary clarity against compositional sophistication. His figural paintings combined modernist abstraction with figurative narrative, creating a distinctive visual language rooted in 1930s social concern that persisted through the 1980s.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
Realism
Medium
Painting
Related Artists
12 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (13)
View all 13 artworks →
Record
Images
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Adjacent in the graph
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Shared movement
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Record
Movements and affiliations
Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
In collection
Cleveland Museum of Art
In collection
Art Institute of Chicago
Market
Auction sale history
Houses that have sold works by this artist at auction
Record