Description:

RALPH FASANELLA (AMERICAN 1914-1997)
Love Goddess, 1964
oil on canvas
114.3 x 203.5 cm (45 x 80 1/8 in.)
framed dimensions: 122.5 x 210.4 x 5 cm (48 1/4 x 82 3/4 x 2 in.)
signed and dated lower right

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the family of the artist)

EXHIBITED
Hill Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan (label on verso)

LITERATURE
Marc Fasanella, Leslie Umberger, and Paul D'Amrosio, Ralph Fasanella: Images of Optimism, Portland: Pomengrate, 2017 (illustrated on pages 56, 60-61)

LOT NOTES

We are grateful to the artist's son, Marc Fasanella, for allowing us to reproduce the following essay from his book, Ralph Fasanella: Images of Optimism

By the time he reached fifty, and after two decades of practice, Ralph had begun to express his thoughts articulately with a paintbrush, and they exploded onto canvas. Ideological passion drove him to paint-not a passion for the art of painting, but a passion for the lives of the people. He painted energetically into the wee hours of the morning, fueled by cigarettes, coffee, and the power of his ideas. His technique constantly evolved; he had no one right way, and his work was not dogmatic. He taught himself to paint by studying other artists and visiting museums. Brueghel, Goya, the impressionists, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rivera, the Ashcan school-he read about them voraciously and saw any exhibits of their works that he could. Because of my father's innate insight into artistic expression, my sexual identity was informed by the paintings of Gustav Klimt. I remember my father coming home from a trip into the city and giving me a folio of loose prints he purchased at a museum bookstore. I was just reaching puberty. I pored over the prints, sorting them and selecting those I liked best, and I studied them before going to sleep. I felt I was having an artistic communion. not with Klimt per se, for I was far too young to understand who he was and his place in art history, but I was mesmerized by the images. seduced by their trancelike quality, their sensuousness. and the balanced opacity and translucence they displayed. These were erotic experiences both carnal and in tell ectual. The languid. beckoning gaze of the women, the crouched, lean, muscular physicality of the men, and the embraces they shared awoke my sensuality.

Klimt's complicated compositions include nude or seminude figures ranging in age from infancy to decrepitude. They introduced an idea of human sexuality based not in exploitation but in shared visceral experience. The eyes and postures of his women beckoned me into a mental relationship that was complicated and deep, if furtive, and separated from me by nearly a century. I wanted to know them, touch them, hold them, and love them. The time I spent with these works taught me the depth of art, the aesthetic, emotional, and even erotic impact an enlightened hand can have on countless viewers.

As an adult I chose to live with my father's painting Love Goddess. Though lacking Klimt's technical mastery, my father 's painting has broadened my view of sexuality over the years. When I remodeled a former family home, I designed a bedroom around the painting and positioned it at the foot of my bed. Painted in the year of my birth, 1964, the central figure-a sexual- revolution version of Botticelli's Venus-presides over a churchyard. She has the languid pose and soulful eyes I had come to know through Klimt. An alluring presence, she sets the crosses that flank her off kilter and dominates the scene with suggestively clothed sexuality. A female messiah on a platform topped with a small swordlike cross and the Times Square triple-X marquee of her intent. she is in erotic repose, atop an altar, dwarfing the churchyard and bed beneath her. The love goddess is attended by a free-love ministry that includes a few monks, a priest, two young pages bearing her banner, and a female Swiss Guard in mod uniforms. Her extended flock includes people sharing time with each other, couples-both hetero- and homosexual-and groups of various genders and ages, in tentative intimacy. They relax and animate a lively urban space.

To the right, a chu rch looms out from the canvas. Its rosette and other stained-glass windows lack depth and have become transformed into a meaningless series of modernist, impressionist, and Africanized motifs. An imposing edifice of warm purple and cool blue-green. the church inhabits more than half the canvas. balanced on the left by a nude figure lying on a dais. A confident young woman in the context of both Ti tian's so-called Pardo Venus and Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, and reclining in an Amedeo Modigliani pose, she is comfortable in her skin, unthreatened by her observers and the congregation around her. Delicate and alluring, she renders the strippers in the windows behind her formless and offsets the blackish church with her grace.

When I discussed Love Goddess with my daughter, Mia, she pointed out how the painting reveals a utopia, cloistered by the church and its courtyard from the indifferent city that looms beyond. People sit, lounge, and recline in comfort-with themselves. with each other, and seemingly with the world at large. The scene. filled with ease and warmth, stands apart from the tenements, housing projects, and modernist backdrop of skyscrapers against a foreboding red sky. Mia contended that Love Goddess illustrates that religion blinds people to the opportunity to create a heavenly existence here on earth, as the focus of Catholicism is often in the hereafter. Her brother, Michael, pointed to the valuable role many faiths play in bettering the world and ci ted the organized ministry of the civil rights movement as one example. Of course they are both right: religion has performed in these ways throughout history-and my father's painting keenly offers the basis for both interpretations.

Love Goddess is a hopeful painting, a utopian notion of human sexuality built upon but unencumbered by the Catholic notion of sin. Having been committed three separate times in his youth to a Catholic protectory run by monks, and knowing the oppressive gui lt of original sin, he created this painting to rise above it. The counterculture of 1964 offered hope against a setting of intolerance, and Love Goddess offers a glimpse of the complexity of that era.

CONDITION
Observed in frame, the work is in very good condition.

N.B. Condition reports are available upon request. All lots are sold in as-is condition at the time of sale. Please note that any condition statement regarding works of art is given as a courtesy to our clients in order to assist them in assessing the condition. The report is a genuine opinion held by Shapiro Auctions and should not be treated as a statement of fact. The absence of a condition report or a photograph does not preclude the absence of defects or restoration, nor does a reference to particular defects imply the absence of any others. Shapiro Auctions, LLC., including its consultants and agents, shall have no responsibility for any error or omission.

Keywords: Outsider art, folk art painting, self-taught Artist, New York City, Manhattan

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October 25, 2025 10:00 AM EDT
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