Ralph Fasanella was born in New York City, the son of Italian immigrant parents. His young years were troubled, in no small part because of the severe economic pressures on his family. His embittered father worked under crushing burdens as an iceman, his mother as a garment worker. As a result of this upbringing, Fasanella developed an enduring and passionate commitment to the struggles of working people. Although the neighborhoods of his youth were populated by a vital Italian-American community, he was less interested in parochial concerns than in universal issues. In 1937, at twenty-three years of age, he went to Spain to fight in the civil war as a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, returning to New York in 1938 to a job as a union organizer.

As early as the 1940s, Fasanella experienced an urge to draw. He had little experience with art, although he remembered being impressed by Greek sculpture and the drawings of William Blake earlier in his life. He began a lifelong practice of carrying a sketchbook with him; he showed proficiency even in his first attempts at drawing. By the 1950s, Fasanella was painting every evening. His subjects reflect his strong ideological commitment to organized labor and to the working people of the city.

Fasanella developed a reputation for his large-scale paintings of the city at work or at play—colorful, richly detailed depictions of city streets, baseball games, political campaigns, strikes, factories, and union halls. Some of his most affecting work, however, is intimate and autobiographical. This painting, one of several that the artist devoted to the subject, portrays his father—”Joe the iceman”—on the cross. Fasanella “began to see his father as the Christ; the cursing and the bitterness were not, in the end, demeaning—they were the sweat and the protest of the stations of the Cross. And the blind, inescapable, unrelieved, mind-clouding daily agony with the ice was the Calvary.” The subject of the painting may be the artist’s father, but the painting is no less a reflection of Fasanella’s social conscience than are his mural-sized depictions of striking workers.

Gerard C. Wertkin, "Iceman Crucified #3," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 377.