Ben Shahn

Like other social realists who developed their mature styles in the 1930s, Benjamin Shahn (1898–1969) embraced political causes and themes of social justice in both his life and his art. Even in his more enigmatic paintings and prints, when politics is not the outright subject, a general anxiety about the state of the world pervades his work.

It is no surprise that the artist was concerned with politics from an early age, as his father was an activist in anti-Czarist movements in their native Lithuania. [1] The family emigrated to America to escape Jewish persecution when Ben was eight, and settled in Brooklyn. Shahn’s introduction to art came with an apprenticeship in a lithography shop at the age of fifteen. This early introduction to graphic art may help to explain both his lifelong interest in printmaking and the emphatic linear nature of his work in all media. While he worked as a lithographer, he took high school classes at night and read voraciously on his own. Shahn began his formal art training in 1916; over the next five years, he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, New York University, and the National Academy of Design. In the 1920s, he traveled abroad, visiting Europe and North Africa. In particular, he admired the work of the early Italian Renaissance artists, whose paintings and frescoes confirmed his belief in the power of line. His work in the 1920s showed the influence of European modernists such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.

Shahn first exhibited his work in 1926 in a group exhibition at the Jewish Art Center in New York. Four years later, Edith Halpert included some of his work in another group show at her Downtown Gallery. In 1931, Shahn completed his first significant series on a political topic: a series of gouaches depicting key players in the Dreyfus Affair, the case in which a Jewish military officer was wrongfully convicted of treason in late nineteenth-century France.

This series set the stage for the paintings Shahn created in 1931 and 1932, which documented the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who were tried and executed for murder. Shahn and other progressives believed that it was the men’s involvement with the anarchist movement that led to their conviction. Shahn’s paintings depict the two men sympathetically. In Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, 1931–1932, Museum of Modern Art, for example, the artist focuses on their expressive faces and the silver shackles that bind them. By this time, Shahn had developed a highly individualized style of modern realism, marked by flattened space, patterned backgrounds, and slightly oversized figures. He often included text in his images, a motif that marked his work throughout his career. The series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery, and it brought Shahn serious attention from the art world for the first time.

During the years of the Great Depression, Shahn, along with so many of his fellow artists, relied on income from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. With encouragement from his friend, the photographer Walker Evans, Shahn took up photography, documenting the lives of the working poor in the South and the Midwest for the Farm Security Administration—an effort designed to elicit support for Roosevelt’s initiatives. At times, his photographs became the visual inspiration for paintings; on their own, they are sympathetic and compelling images of the Depression.

Shahn’s commitment to social justice led to an interest in murals, since they are an art form accessible to all social classes. In 1933, he assisted Diego Rivera on murals for Rockefeller Center. Although the murals were eventually destroyed because Rivera insisted on including an image of Lenin, the experience revealed the possibilities of the art form for Shahn. He completed murals for post offices, community centers, and the Social Security headquarters in Washington, taking the lives of the urban poor and immigrants as his subjects. In the mural for the Bronx Central Post Office entitled Resources of America, 1938–1939, he included an image of and lines from the poet Walt Whitman. He even designed a mural, later rejected, for Rikers Island prison in New York. Later in life, he designed wall mosaics for synagogues, schools, and libraries.

During World War II, Shahn worked for the Office of War Information, designing anti-Nazi posters such as This Is Nazi Brutality, 1942. Only two were ever published, perhaps because Shahn’s subjects were so grim. Shahn was horrified by the war’s destruction: the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the loss of civilian lives in Europe, where he had traveled so happily in the 1920s. [2] The work that he did during and after the war reflected the sense of disillusionment he felt and was characterized by a new interest in allegory and surrealism. Often set in bleak landscapes, the paintings feature haunting figures, scenes of destruction, flames, and threatening men and animals. Throughout his career, Shahn remained committed to his stylized figures and forms even as more and more of his peers began to embrace abstraction.

In 1944, Shahn built on the propaganda work he did with the Office of War Information to support organized labor, taking a job with the Congress of Industrial Organizations and working to re-elect President Roosevelt. The experience accelerated his interest in the connection between image and text, and he began integrating text into more of his paintings and especially his lithographs.

Shahn’s status in the art world rose after the war. In 1947, the Museum of Modern Art held a large retrospective of his work. The following year, he was chosen by Look magazine as one of the ten best artists in the country. [3] He spent the summer of 1951 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1954, he and Willem de Kooning represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Two years later, Harvard University invited him to give a series of lectures that was later published as The Shape of Content. He also created illustrations for published volumes of the Haggadah and Ecclesiastes.

In the 1960s, Shahn was active in anti-war, anti-nuclear, and Civil Rights movements, lending his talents to the design of posters and other propaganda materials. His later style was distilled, with forms and figures often created solely from heavy black outlines with accompanying text. His commitment to social causes drew negative reactions from critics such as Clement Greenberg, who felt that an artist’s motives should be purely to create art and not to support political positions.

In his personal life as well, Shahn committed to issues of social justice. Divorced from his first wife, he lived for many years with the artist and activist Bernarda Bryson, whom he eventually married, in a New Jersey community planned as a New Deal project. Shahn died in New Jersey in 1969; one of his final acts was to sign copies of his lithograph of Martin Luther King for a charity sale. [4]

Notes:

[1] See Frances K. Pohl, Ben Shahn (San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1993), and Howard Greenfeld, “Chronology,” in Susan Chevlowe, Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[2] Pohl, Ben Shahn, 20.

[3] Greenfeld, “Chronology,” 186.

[4] Greenfeld, “Chronology,” 189.