In “The Biography of a Painting,” an essay drawn from his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1956–1957, Ben Shahn remembers his early years as an artist within the Twenties, when he was enamored of Publish-Impressionist and Fauvist landscapes and peopled his canvases with bathers and nudes. “The work had a nice professional look about it,” he recollects, “and it rested, I think, on a fairly solid academic training.” Quickly, although, Shahn started to doubt whether or not such nice, inoffensive work sufficed. “This may be art,” his “inner critic” whispered, “but is it my own art?”
After which I started to understand that nevertheless skilled my work would possibly seem, even nevertheless unique it could be, it nonetheless didn’t comprise the central particular person which, for good or in poor health, was myself…. All my views and notions on life and politics, all this materials and way more which should represent the substance of no matter particular person I used to be, lay outdoors the scope of my very own portray.
What was lacking was not solely Shahn himself however the period to which he belonged. There was little in his life which may sq. with the light-filled vistas of Cézanne and Matisse. He was born in 1898 to Jewish dad and mom within the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, in what’s now Lithuania; his household was poor and below risk from antisemitic violence. In 1902 his father, a socialist and a wood-carver, was exiled to Siberia for alleged anti-tsarist exercise. After escaping, he made his method to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the place the remainder of the household joined him in 1906, among the many waves of European immigrants to the US on the flip of the century.
When Shahn was fifteen, his dad and mom pulled him from faculty and apprenticed him to a lithographer on the Decrease East Aspect to assist help the household. By 1919 he was taking night time lessons on the Nationwide Academy of Design, and he traveled to Europe twice within the Twenties, returning simply earlier than the inventory market crash in 1929; he later felt that Europe had “detoured” him from discovering his personal route. Shahn had developed an obsession with injustice throughout his childhood, and the devastation of the Melancholy renewed it. In 1930 he launched into a brand new sequence: watercolor portraits of the central figures within the Dreyfus Affair. Shahn primarily based them on information pictures and gave them brief, hand-drawn captions, however they resemble charming illustrations greater than complicated artworks.
In his subsequent two sequence of work, Shahn addressed the controversial trials of the Italian immigrants and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been executed in Massachusetts in 1927 for 2 murders that many individuals believed they didn’t commit, and of the labor chief Tom Mooney, who was convicted of bombing the 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco and ultimately pardoned after serving twenty-two years in jail. Shahn once more primarily based his work on information clippings and different pictures however now added his personal standpoint. The Ardour of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932) depicts the 2 executed males on the backside of a big vertical canvas, their pale faces simply seen over the edges of their coffins. A lot of the composition is given to the trio of commissioners who, tasked with investigating fees of bias within the trial, upheld the decision—their faces sagging and stony, their staid officiousness echoing the resolute strains of the courthouse behind them. Two of the lads maintain white lilies, symbols of innocence and rebirth, although their useless eyes stare into the center distance, not on the martyred useless.
Shahn labored towards what he noticed as a rising tide of inventive “disengagement” on the finish of the Twenties—little doubt a veiled reference to abstraction. “As artists of a decade or so earlier had delighted to épater le bourgeois,” he writes in “The Biography of a Painting,” “so I found it pleasant, to borrow a line from Leonard Baskin, to épater l’avant-garde.” Accessibility was important to his new imaginative and prescient of artwork; the demand for justice have to be legible to a large viewers. His work of Sacco and Vanzetti drew the same old artwork crowd and likewise what he known as “an entirely new kind of public,” together with immigrants, journalists, and different sympathizers. The humorist Robert Benchley despatched Shahn a e book concerning the case, inscribed, “To Ben Shahn without whom this crime could never have been committed.”
The Ardour of Sacco and Vanzetti opens the Jewish Museum’s exhibition “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” and its prominence on the strategy to the gallery’s glass doorways makes for an apt announcement of the present’s theme: Shahn’s lifelong dedication to social justice and his curiosity within the human situation. Curated by Laura Katzman, a professor of artwork historical past at James Madison College, it’s the first main retrospective of Shahn’s artwork in the USA since 1976. It takes its title from one other of his Norton Lectures, “On Nonconformity,” which serves as his manifesto about artwork making and social duty—concepts evident all through his physique of labor, even when Shahn didn’t enunciate them till the Nineteen Fifties, with the rise of the Home Un-American Actions Committee and McCarthyism.
Nonconformity, for Shahn, meant having compassion for “human woes”; it meant being a thorn within the aspect of these committing “social and political malpractice” and protesting for one’s beliefs each within the streets and on the canvas. By this measure, many of the work in his Sacco and Vanzetti and Mooney sequence don’t fairly hit the mark. Katzman has included Shahn’s supply materials, which makes for fascinating comparisons and divulges how little Shahn reworked the unique information gadgets in his early works. For instance, his watercolor of Sacco’s mom, father, nieces, and nephews reproduces the stiff composition of the supply {photograph}—the household of six sitting or standing erect and staring instantly on the digicam—besides that Shahn thwarts the dour temper by including cheerful colours.
Shahn’s Two Witnesses, Mellie Edeau and Sadie Edeau (1932) is a portray of a mom and daughter who testified falsely towards Mooney at his trial. The clipping on which it’s primarily based, from round 1919, features a {photograph} of the Edeaus below the heading “TWO BLOOD-HUNTING VULTURES” and identifies them as “self-confessed perjurers.” (“What difference does it make so long as you get paid for it?” they’re quoted as having stated.) Shahn’s model is a lovely mixture of delicate, nearly chiseled strains—born from his early coaching as a lithographer, wherein he “cut” strains into lithographic stones—and free, layered areas of paint dominated by Sadie’s golden-yellow broad-brimmed hat. He moved the ladies from the inside setting of the {photograph} to an out of doors view of inexperienced panorama and darkening sky, however the portray extra intently resembles an image of women out for a stroll than one among amoral charlatans who would do something for a bit of cash.
Nonetheless, his artwork caught the attention of Diego Rivera, who invited Shahn in 1932 to hitch his staff in portray a mural at Rockefeller Middle the next 12 months. This mural, Man on the Crossroads, was destroyed earlier than it was completed, in one of many twentieth century’s most infamous examples of inventive censorship. The Rockefeller household, Rivera’s patron, had demanded that he take away a portrait of Lenin from the crowded composition. When Rivera refused, the mural was plastered over, and protests ensued. Shahn, who strongly opposed Lenin’s elimination, was thrust into the maelstrom of leftist politics, and it suited him. Staunchly antifascist and antiauthoritarian, he joined the Artists’ Union and briefly edited its journal, Artwork Entrance, however rejected the dogmatism of communism after Stalin’s present trials.
The Melancholy years had been a scrabble for dependable paying work. Shahn and the artist Lou Block proposed an bold mural for the brand new Rikers Island Penitentiary with reference to jail reform and vocational coaching, however the metropolis rejected it in 1935. “Look young man,” Shahn recollects being advised, “if there was any money for painting, we’d paint the toilets first.” In a string of interviews with the Archives of American Artwork within the Nineteen Sixties, Shahn gives the look of getting tirelessly roamed the streets within the mid-Thirties, discovering curiosity and frustration round each nook. The main points of on a regular basis life intrigued him, however sketching was insufficient.
Shahn was agnostic about which mediums he labored in all through his lengthy profession, making posters, work, drawings, murals, illustrations, and books. “Anything that I did with my hands, with a brush, or pencil, or pen, and so on, I considered art,” he stated. Now he took up images, armed with a 35mm Leica and a cursory lesson from his studio mate, Walker Evans: “F9 on the sunny side of the street, F4.5 on the shady side of the street. For a twentieth of a second hold your camera steady.” He took footage of Jewish retailers on the Decrease East Aspect, {couples} on their stoops in Greenwich Village, union demonstrations round New York Metropolis, and inmates at a reformatory within the Hudson Valley.
Shahn’s artwork was reworked within the fall of 1935 when he joined the Particular Abilities Division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Safety Administration) and spent three months touring within the mid-Atlantic, the South, and the Midwest together with his digicam. It was an training:
I spotted [that] all the things I had gotten concerning the situation of miners or cotton pickers I’d gotten on 14th Road. I discovered realities there that I had no concept about…. I turned acquainted with America.
Throughout these months he photographed sharecroppers, cotton pickers, destitute households, hanging employees, and a drugs present. The Jewish Museum’s choice gives the look that Shahn was most fascinated with individuals, not landscapes or structure or establishments, a way bolstered by his work from the time. He devised a right-angle viewfinder that allowed him to take footage with out his topics realizing it—an “arresting of unconscious mood,” as his spouse, the artist Bernarda Bryson Shahn, described it.
In producing a considerable quantity of documentary materials for federal reduction applications, Shahn additionally created an archive that he might use for his personal artwork, and the work and posters he made throughout and after this era are decidedly extra dynamic and psychologically acute than the works that preceded them. One portray, Scotts Run, West Virginia (1937), relies on his 1935 {photograph} of six hanging coal miners milling round a dust yard with a few practice vehicles within the background. For the portray he pulled the {photograph}’s three central figures radically into the foreground and introduced out particulars of their faces, highlighting their piercing glances and the downward strains round their mouths. He additionally reimagined the setting in order that it turned extra dramatic, with a black practice stretching into the space alongside the left aspect and a sequence of wood homes receding alongside the best, hemming the miners in. The slender open area behind the portray leads into an empty panorama, but it appears the one outlet for Shahn’s abject miners.
As soon as Shahn tailored a component from {a photograph} right into a portray or poster, it turned a part of his visible lexicon. In October 1935 he photographed Sam Nichols, a tenant farmer in Arkansas, in entrance of a ramshackle home. Nichols appears into the digicam, eyes darkened by shadow, his proper hand tucked below his left elbow and his left hand cradling his chin. A virtually similar determine fills the portray 1943
AD (circa 1943), however this man stands behind a barbed-wire fence with employees toiling within the background. The higher strand of wire crosses his brow: a crown of thorns that troubles an already troubled forehead. One other practically similar determine seems within the poster We Struggle for a Free World! (circa 1942), and yet one more within the portray Man (1946), which was reused for a poster that very same 12 months encouraging voter registration.
Throughout World Conflict II, Shahn threw his efforts briefly into the Workplace of Conflict Info, however most of his poster designs had been rejected as too strident or too ambiguous. The handful on view on the Jewish Museum aren’t apocalyptic, however nor are they the form of Madison Avenue propaganda that the OWI got here to desire. Victims, not dogma, had been his chosen topic, and it’s clear that his intent was to create empathetic connections between civilians experiencing horrors in Europe and the parents again dwelling.
His work from about 1943 to 1945 do really feel apocalyptic, or at the least transmit a bleak urgency. Pulling once more from newspaper clippings and from “the secret confidential horrible” paperwork he had entry to throughout his stint with the OWI, he depicted vulnerability brought on by warfare’s brutality as a substitute of exhibiting the brutality outright: youngsters begging a soldier for a bit of gum close to twists of exploded railroad observe, black-clad widows adrift amongst piles of rubble, and a common aimlessness and desperation. For these works Shahn appears to have dug deeper into his “inner view,” as he known as it—not the dreamworld of Surrealism, which he discovered limiting, however his innermost ideas and emotions. The human faces he aimed to seize throughout these years summon the notion he had throughout the Melancholy: “Statistics meant nothing. Six million were unemployed…. I wanted to tell the story of one individual.”
Because the many years progressed, Shahn’s artwork mirrored the struggles of the labor motion, the struggle for civil liberties, and the anxieties of the chilly warfare (although as Katzman notes within the exhibition catalog, his photographs not often portrayed ladies at work, regardless of his personal private {and professional} relationships with politically engaged, pioneering ladies). He created posters in help of farmers, employees, voting rights, and integration and made particular person portraits within the Nineteen Sixties of Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and others utilizing his signature chiseled line. But the components of the exhibition dedicated to this work, notably in help of civil rights, are curtailed as compared together with his Melancholy-era materials. With a view to present the breadth of his output, these sections rely extra on examples of Shahn’s graphic editorial tasks—e book covers, ads for CBS, illustrations for Fortune, Harper’s, and The Nation—that don’t absolutely display his political opinions.
There are far fewer examples of his “personal realism,” a time period he used to explain the transition in his artwork after he joined the Resettlement Administration from a social realism of the plenty to a concentrate on the day by day life of people. It concerned direct remark and a way of the temper of a individuals or place. Among the greatest works within the present fall into this free class, together with Handball (1939), an outline of a playground courtroom whose white wall resembles a clean web page blocking out the town behind it—a metaphorical clear slate for play and leisure (see illustration at prime of article). One other standout is Willis Avenue Bridge (1940), a portray of two black ladies sitting on a slatted bench and framed by the pink lattice trusses of the bridge, big X’s echoing the overlapping strains of 1 lady’s crutches.
Different work from this era appears much less certain of itself. Shahn doesn’t fairly appear to know what to do with the thinkers in Existentialists (1957): a good cluster of 4 seated males, every trying in a special route. Is it meant as social commentary or a illustration of intellectuals asea? Korea (circa 1958), a pleasingly Giotto-esque composition in gray-blue and brown, exhibits two heroically sized, blocky troopers in wordless communication, however the portray’s feelings are ambiguous, particularly as compared with Leon Golub’s visceral and brutal depictions of troopers within the Vietnam Conflict made only some years later. As Shahn turned to extra abstruse topics like molecular science, nuclear weaponry, and philosophy, he combined allegory and an summary visible language into his realism with a purpose to specific his ethical and moral considerations concerning the new scientific age. However the private facet that enlivened his earlier work will get misplaced. A 1958 screenprint of a lute and a molecule, each rendered in an interesting composition of strains and circles, is a too-oblique argument for the guiding position of the humanities in scientific advances, and his 1954 portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer offers nothing away.
Shahn was on the peak of his recognition after World Conflict II. The Museum of Trendy Artwork gave him a retrospective in 1947 and chosen him and Willem de Kooning to characterize the USA on the Venice Biennale in 1954. Not lengthy after, the London Sunday Occasions reported on the event of a “Shahn School” there, describing Shahn as “the first American to have had any considerable impact upon European painting” and “one of the world’s few great artists.” He taught at Black Mountain School in 1951 and at Skowhegan all through the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties and was a frequent visitor on tv applications. His work bought nicely. But critically, he was going out of favor. Reviewing the MoMA present in The Nation, Clement Greenberg excoriated Shahn’s work:
This artwork will not be necessary, is actually irrelevant so far as bold present-day portray is anxious, and is way more by-product than it appears at first look. There’s a poverty of tradition and assets, a pinchedness, a resignation to the minor, a sure need for fast acceptance.
Shahn railed towards what he noticed as abstraction’s concentrate on the mechanics of portray over content material, arguing in 1951 that it “affords an easy berth to the person who says nothing simply because he has nothing to say.” (Minimalism acquired a higher lashing. “I’ve been mean about minimal art,” he advised an interviewer in 1968, “because minimal art can only satisfy minimal minds. And is often created by minimal minds.”) He received into heated debates with the Summary Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell, who recalled Shahn evaluating his work to a marriage cake—“decorative and good to taste.” Motherwell known as Shahn “the leading Communist modern artist in America” and claimed that his work “contains no feeling for real humanity and its capacity for self-realization.”
In reality, Shahn and Motherwell had extra in frequent than both appeared to know. Shahn described realist artwork as “an earnest search for truth within the framework of one’s own values.” He sought out particulars, not generalities, and believed that the method of turning these particulars into artwork was what made them common. Humanism was his North Star. “I am unwilling to regard man as of use value,” he wrote in 1951. “To me the human being is ultimate value.” In an interview from 1971, Motherwell described his personal portray as a steadiness between common parts and private ones. He contrasted himself with Mondrian, who, he stated, put human beings right into a “structuralized” universe on par with all the things else on the planet, whereas for Motherwell, that they had higher worth: “In the end, the center of my work is human beings.”
However Motherwell believed that the American expertise have to be explored in artwork “without using the objects and paraphernalia, the anecdotes and propaganda of a discredited social world.” And Shahn, who was seventeen years older and had grown up in very completely different circumstances, overtly considered his personal artwork as propaganda. His conception of it, although, was fairly completely different from that of most twentieth-century examples, which tended to advertise help for the navy or the state, encourage patriotism, or demonize the enemy.
“Propaganda is to me a noble word,” Shahn stated in 1968. “It means you believe something very strongly and you want other people to believe it; you want to propagate your faith.” His “propaganda” didn’t hew to a celebration line, and it refused to see individuals as a mass. “One has sympathy with a hurt person, not because he is a generality, but precisely because he is not,” Shahn wrote in “The Biography of a Painting.”
The entire viewers of artwork is an viewers of people. Every of them involves the portray or sculpture as a result of there he will be advised that he, the person, transcends all lessons and flouts all predictions. Within the murals he finds his uniqueness affirmed.
In his assessment of the exhibition for The New Yorker’s web site, Zachary Effective criticizes it for not being primarily based on a contemporary tranche of labor or new scholarship. However are these the one causes to revisit an artist’s oeuvre? “Instead, the gambit here is to shock-paddle Shahn back to life, as an unsung national hero,” Effective writes, accusing the present of asking viewers to understand Shahn’s artwork “because of his exemplary politics.” This strikes me as unfair, even cynical. As many artists take into consideration how they will deal with private emotions of political and social duty of their work, and as audiences look to the humanities for which means and route, Shahn is a helpful precedent. His artwork addresses issues of personhood—private dignity above all, maybe—whereas recognizing that these points are additionally social ones (and recurring ones at that). He hypothesized that “there is some degree of nonconformity in us all, perhaps conquered or suppressed in the interest of our general well-being,” and that artwork might remind us of our spirit of insurrection and, paradoxically, assist us to see each other extra clearly.
In 1944 Shahn painted The Clinic, a portrait of two working-class ladies within the ready room of an OB-GYN workplace. Their sallow complexions replicate the room’s dingy tiled partitions, rendered in a confining grid. Behind them hangs a poster of a small baby with the caption “DO I DESERVE PRENATAL CARE?” A reviewer of Howard Greenfeld’s 1998 biography of Shahn opined that Shahn’s “somber, austere visual protests against injustice and his tough-and-tender humanitarian allegories tend to be viewed as period pieces rather than timeless works,” however The Clinic stays very important in our post-Roe period, as MAGA politicians defund Deliberate Parenthood and Medicaid—the very applications that present reproductive well being look after roughly a 3rd of girls in the USA, a lot of whom dwell at or under the federal poverty degree.
“Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere,” Shahn wrote in 1957, “a failure of hope or belief or rebellion.”
With out the particular person of outspoken opinion…with out the critic, with out the visionary, with out the nonconformist, any society of no matter diploma of perfection should fall into decay. Its habits (allow us to say its virtues) will inevitably grow to be entrenched and tyrannical; its controls will grow to be inaccessible to the strange citizen.
When he wrote these phrases, the teachings of World Conflict II and the McCarthy period had been contemporary in his thoughts, as had been the “civic crusades” towards artists, carried out below the guise of patriotic watchfulness.
Jewish Museum, New York/© 2025 Property of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Ben Shahn: Flowering Brushes, 1968
Shahn’s final act was a return to his Jewish roots—a reckoning and a celebration. He disliked being known as a “Jewish artist” (“I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels most would choose none,” he wrote), however earlier than his demise in 1969 he reconciled with the faith of his youth “without the sense of moral burden and entrapment,” in line with Bryson Shahn. The exhibition features a beneficiant collection of his drawings, prints, watercolors, and gouaches of psalms, historical Jewish legends, and symbolic ritual objects, in addition to two illustrated books, Haggadah (1966) and Ecclesiastes, or, The Preacher (1971). Some are amongst Shahn’s most summary works, illustrating the surprise and thriller of the universe and paired with the poetry of the Outdated Testomony rendered in Hebrew in Shahn’s personal stunning calligraphy. The place Wast Thou? (1964) gathers an assortment of varieties in purples, blues, and gold: a cluster of rectangles overlaid with a constellation of stars hovers above a dense community of triangles wreathed by wispy, flame-like black strains. Out of this development, above a citation from the e book of Job, emerges the define of a hand, cradling this newly shaped world.
The exhibition hyperlinks Shahn’s Judaism to a lesson from the first-century-BCE rabbi Hillel the Elder, whose writing Shahn integrated into a number of late works: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I care only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” These phrases seem in Hebrew throughout the highest of a lithograph, Flowering Brushes (1968), that exhibits the layered outlines of a determine, one hand to chin, the opposite greedy a bouquet of paintbrushes that erupt in a blaze of coloration. (It’s the pose of the tenant farmer Sam Nichols in a single final look.) Flowering Brushes capabilities because the clearest illustration of Shahn’s perception in artwork’s social and ethical duty—to talk out towards absolutism, corruption, violence, alienation, and neglect. Artwork, he believed, might maintain these concepts as passionate testomony, held in belief for the long run.
