The obscurity of Nunzio La Spina seems unwarranted in light of the quality and impact of his masterpiece, Jackhammer, a tribute to the indispensable contribution of labor to the transformation of the Manhattan skyline in the early Thirties.  What possessed an obscure, young artist, known today for just a handful of largely pedestrian paintings, to create this monumental, iconic painting of his adopted city?  

     Born in Palermo, Sicily, on the brink of the twentieth century, La Spina emigrated to America in July of 1914, two months shy of his fourteenth birthday.  His father, Giacchino, had arrived eight years earlier.  The artist first appears in census records as a Manhattan resident in 1920, living with his mother and three siblings and making his living as a barber.  A 1925 New York census lists a John La Spina (living with his wife, Angeline), both of whom are identified as interior designers.  It is likely that John, who is listed as a participant in the Society for Independent Artists annual exhibition of 1928 (as a member of the Art Students League), and Nunzio are the same person.*  Family sources indicate that the artist also studied at the National Academy of Design.  Military service enlistment records from 1942 identify Nunzio as a draftsman of slight build (5’5” and 123 pounds) with two years of high school education. His service, however, inexplicably terminated within five months, at the peak of World War II.**  

     La Spina’s Portrait of Lillian, submitted to the Salons of America exhibition at New York’s Rockefeller Center in April of 1934, garnered favorable notice from Edward Alden Jewell, art critic for The New York Times.***  It was one of only a handful of works (from among 5,000 submitted) reproduced in Jewell’s review of the exhibition.  Despite this promising recognition, La Spina’s art career never gained traction.  Circumstantial evidence suggests that La Spina, like countless other artists during the Depression, was unable to sustain himself as a professional artist.  His participation in W.P.A. artist relief programs is confirmed by the existence of two floral still lifes, one bearing a date of 1936, presently in the collection of the New Deal Art Gallery at the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts in Mount Morris, New York. La Spina’s 1937 removal from the rolls of the W.P.A. is documented by a New York Times article in which he is identified as one of a pair of plaintiffs suing for reinstatement to the Federal Art Project, contending “that they were dropped without legal cause and that their constitutional rights were thereby violated.”****  Although the immediate outcome of the legal action is unknown, the artist was once again employed by the federal government by the early 1940s, recorded as having completed work on mural decoration for a ceiling in the lobby of the Psychiatric Building of New York’s Bellevue Hospital under the aegis of the Federal Art Project.  While most of the few remaining works in La Spina’s estate (including the Self-Portrait illustrated in Fig. 1) were sold at auction in 2000, nothing even remotely as ambitious as Jackhammer has appeared on the art market.

     His otherwise meager artistic accomplishments notwithstanding, La Spina’s Jackhammer is as satisfying as it is ambitious. Nearly six feet in height, the painting depicts a muscled construction worker, possibly an Italian immigrant like the artist himself, operating a pneumatic drill against an iconic background featuring the nearly-completed Rockefeller Center on the right and the George Washington Bridge (opened in 1931) on the left. Flanked by heavy construction equipment and silhouetted by an exaggerated sunrise (reminiscent, perhaps, of the halo frequently appearing in Renaissance art), the nameless laborer, as indestructible as his handiwork, is heralded as the hero by whose sweat the architectural and engineering marvels of the city have emerged.

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* New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell made note of an exhibition in November of 1929 featuring modern landscapes and portraits by “John N. La Spina, a young Italian artist,” at the Little Carnegie Playhouse in Manhattan.  See Jewell, Edward Alden, “Art in Fourteenth Encyclopaedia Britannica,” The New York Times, November 17, 1929.

** The bulk of the information in this paragraph was accessed through online resources at www.ancestry.com.

*** Jewell, Edward Alden, “The Realm of Art: More Than Five Miles of Pictures,” The New York Times, April 15, 1934; Jewell, Edward Alden, “A Salons Valedictory,” The New York Times, April 29, 1934.

 **** “Sue to Keep W.P.A. Jobs,” The New York Times, July 23, 1937.