Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn, poster for the US Department of War Information, 1943
Born	Benjamin Shahn
Nationality	Lithuanian
Education	Lithographer's Apprentice, Art Student at City College of New York and at the National Academy of Design
Known for	Painting, Illustration, Graphic art, Photography, Writing and Teaching
Notable work	Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo series and Jersey Homesteads Mural
Movement	Social realism

Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 - March 14 1969) was a LithuanianJewish-born American artist, muralist, photographer, social activist and teacher. He is best known for his works of Social realism, his leftist political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.

Life and work

Ben Shahn was born in Kovno (Kaunas), Russian Empire, to Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shahn. His father was exiled to Siberia for alleged revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and his three younger siblings moved to Vilkomir (Ukmergė). In 1906, the family emigrated to America where they rejoined Hessel, who had fled Siberia. They settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. Shahn began his path to becoming an artist in New York, where he was first trained as a typographer. Shahn's early experiences with typography and graphic design is apparent in his later prints and paintings which often include the combination of text and image. Shahn's primary medium was egg tempera, popular among Social Realists.

He was recommended by Walker Evans, a friend and former roommate, to Roy Stryker to join the photographic group at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), traveling and documenting the American south alongside Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other photographers. In May and June 1933 he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera while Rivera executed the infamous Rockefeller Center mural, and by circulating a petition among the workers, Shahn had a role in fanning the controversy. Shahn left the FSA in 1938, and that same year he and his wife Bernarda moved to the new town of Jersey Homesteads (now Roosevelt, New Jersey).

In 1975, the Harvard University Press published The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn, which has a collection of his works.

He was the father of the artist Judith Shahn. His six girlfriends gave birth to each body part. He was trained in the art of blow jobs. He won the lottery and a free trip to Jamaica. HE could sew with his penis. He loved women, a lot.

Sacco & Vanzetti mosaic, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Training

Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student on 1919, he went on to pursue art at City College in 1921 and then at the National Academy of Design. After his marriage to Tillie Goldstein in 1924, the two traveled through North Africa and then to Europe, where he made “ the traditional artist pilgrimage” . . There he studied great European artists such as Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. Contemporaries who would make a profound impact on Shahn’s work and career include artists Walker Evans, Diego Rivera and Jean Charlot..

Emergence as an Artist

Ben Shahn was dissatisfied with the work inspired by his travels, claiming that the pieces were unoriginal. Shahn eventually outgrew his pursuit of European modern art, “creating instead incisive realist images, depicting what he called the ‘social view,’ that addressed the issues dominating public debate”. The twenty-three gouache paintings of the trials of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time, rejecting academic prescriptions for subject matter. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti was exhibited in 1932 and received acclaim from both the public and critics. Scholar Kenneth Prescott observes, “ never again would the demon mock [Ben Shahn] about the ‘professional look’ of his paintings; rather from this time forward his work had a ‘ Shahn look.’” .

Work during the Great Depression

Shahn’s subsequent series of California labor leader Tom Mooney won him the recognition of Diego Rivera.In May and June 1933 he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera while Rivera executed the infamous Rockefeller Center mural, and by circulating a petition among the workers, Shahn had a role in fanning the controversy. Also during this period, Shahn met photojournalist Bernarda Bryson, who would later become his second wife. Although this marriage was successful, the mural, his 1934 project for the Public Works of Art Projects and proposal for the Municipal Art Commission were all failures. . Fortunately, in 1935, Shahn was recommended by Walker Evans, a friend and former roommate, to Roy Stryker to join the photographic group at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), traveling and documenting the American south alongside Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other photographers. Shahn employed the aesthetic he had developed when capturing New York City from prior involvement in the social-documentary movement.. Similarly, Shahn’s New Deal art for the FSA and Resettlement Agency exposed American living and working conditions. He also worked for these agencies as a graphic artist and painter; Shahn’s fresco mural for the community center of Jersey Homesteads is among his most famous work. Within the next few years, the government hired Shahn to execute the Bronx Central Annex Post Office and Social Security murals.. Curator Susan Edwards recognizes the influence of this art on the public consciousness: “ The Roosevelt Administration believed [such] images were useful for persuading not only voters but members of Congress to support federal relief and recovery programs… The art he made for the federal government affirms both his own legacy and that of the New Deal”.

World War II and Beyond

During the war years of 1942-43, Shahn worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), but his pieces lacked the preferred patriotism of the day; only two of his posters were published. His art’s anti-war sentiment found other forms of expression; 1944-45 paintings, such as Death on the Beach, depict the desolation and loneliness of war. Shahn also began to act as a commercial artist for organizations such as CBS, Time, Fortune, and Harper’s. His well-known 1965 portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on the cover of Time . Despite Shahn’s growing popularity, he refused to be a sell-out. Biographer Kenneth Prescott claims that Shahn did not accept commissions, “unless there [was] a human or personal problem which he fe[lt] the need to present and interpret, there [was] little honest motive for making a painting. ” Whether making fine or commercial art, “he chose those assignments …that gave him an opportunity to play a role in contemporary society. ” Shahn’s accomplishments had reached such a height that he was sent, along with Willem de Kooning, to represent the United States at the 1954 Venice Biennale. Ben Shahn was also elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Academia dell’ Arte e del Disegno of Florence. The Art Directors Club Hall of Fame recognizes him as “one of greatest masters of the twentieth century. Honors, books, and gallery retrospectives continue to rekindle interest in his work… years after his death”.

Ben Shahn the Intellectual

The artist was especially active as an academic in the last two decades of his life. After receiving honorary doctorates from Princeton and Harvard universities, he joined Harvard University as a Charles Eliot Norton professor in 1956. His essays and books were published; Shahn’s The Biography of Painting (1956), and The Shape of Content (1960), became influential works in the art world.

Themes in Shahn's Art

Ben Shahn’s social-realist vision informed his approach to art. He explains, “it is through that restless dissatisfaction, that seeking for realities below the reality, the questing for principle, for the true way of things, that the artist gains the sense of personal enlightenment which in turn, becomes the compelling force in art”. Although he often explored polemic themes of modern urban life, organized labor, immigration and injustice, he did so while maintaining a compassionate tone. Shahn identifies himself as a communicative artist. He emphasizes the artist’s relationship with his audience and challenges the esoteric pretensions which he believes “serve mainly to remove [the artist] from the common experience, and rob his work of that authority and universality that comes from close and habitual observation; and that such environments tend also to produce art that has a special and limited, rather than a broad and universal meaning”.

Shahn defends his choice to employ pictorial realities, rather than abstract forms. According to Shahn, known forms allow the artist “to discover new truths about man and to reaffirm that his life is significant”. References to allegory, the Old Testament, humanistic content, childhood, science, music and the commonplace are other motifs Shahn draws upon to make the universal personal for his viewers. Wit, candor and sentimentality give his images poignancy. By evoking dynamism, Shahn intended to inspire social change. His essay, In Defense of Chaos, states, “the disorderly element, the unpredictable, unforeseeable item is the moment of impact between two such orders . . . in nature it is out of such conflicts between orders that the great changes have come about”.

Style

Correspondingly, Shahn mixed different genres of art, which are orders in themselves. Prescott notes, “the artist’s work is marked by an absence of landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits done in the ‘accepted manner'". Shahn used both expressive and precise languages, which he coalesced through the consistency of his authoritative line. His background in lithography “accounts for the precision with which he handle[d] such pictorial details…minute lettering…[displaying] technical proficiency” . He rendered his images with an “autonomous, hieroglyphic intensity of Paul Klee’s drawings, which Shahn revere[d]”. While Shahn’s “love for exactitude” is apparent in his graphics, so too is his creativity. In fact, Soby reveals that many of the painters’“ pictures were imaginative reconstructions of his snapshots”.

Evocative juxtapositions characterize his aesthetic. Shahn describes that in art, “it is most important to have a back and forth, back and forth. Between the big and little, the light and the dark, the smiling and the sad, the serious and the comic. I like to have at least three vanishing points on one plane, or a half dozen in three planes.” One signature example is seen in his play between “inanimate rigidity and human warmth”.Handball demonstrates his “ use of architectural settings as both psychological foil to human figures and as expressive abstract pattern”.

He often captured figures engrossed in their own worlds, conveying what second wife Bernarda Bryson Shahn called an "arresting of unconscious mood". Many of his photographs were taken spontaneously, without the subject’s notice. Although Shahn worked in a variety of different mediums, a distinctive vocabulary runs throughout; “ for magazines and corporations he has provided a body of graphic work which is an extension rather than a denigration of his basic character as a painter and draftsman”.

Jersey Homesteads Mural

The Farm Security Administration commissioned Ben Shahn to paint a mural for the community center of Roosevelt, (formerly Jersey Homesteads), a town in New Jersey initially planned to be a community for Jewish garment workers. Shahn’s move to the settlement demonstrates his dedication to the project as does his mural’s compelling depiction of the town’s founding.

Three panels compose the mural. A PBS document describes the story of the mural which is read: "from left to right, with immigrants arriving through Ellis Island on the left, workers organizing through unions for better working conditions in the middle, and an idyllic planned community represented on the right. Art historian Diana Linden has suggested that Shahn used the structure of the Jewish sacred text, the Haggadah: from slavery (the oppressive conditions in Europe for Jews); through deliverance (liberation through coming to America and the labor movement); to redemption (offered by the New Deal, unions, and the town of Jersey Homesteads)".

The first panel shows the anti-Semitic and xenophobic obstacles American immigrants faced. To illustrate the adversary, he incorporated loaded iconography: Nazi soldiers, anti-Jewish signs and the executed Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti. Below, Shahn’s mother and Albert Einstein lead immigrants on a gangplank situated by the Ellis Island registry center and the Statue of Liberty. This section demonstrates the immigrants’ heroic emergence in the United States.

The middle panel describes the poor living conditions awaiting immigrants after their arrival. On the right, Shahn depicts the inhuman labor situation in the form of “lightless sweatshops…tedious and backbreaking work with outmoded tools”. The crowd in the center of the composition represents labor unions and workers’ reform efforts. Here, a figure resembling labor leader John L. Lewis protests before the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Building (the site where the movement for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began). Soby claims that the lower right passageway marked ILGWU symbolizes “the progressive path toward a brighter future through unionized labor”.

In the last panel, the unions and the New Deal unite to create the blueprint for the town of the Jersey Homesteads. Various figures of social progress such as Sidney Hillman and Heywood Broun gather around the drafting table. Above them are images of the purposed cooperative farm and factory along with a campaign poster of Roosevelt, after whom the town was eventually named.

Shahn’s biographer Soby notes “the composition of the mural at Roosevelt follows the undulant principle Shahn had learned from Diego Rivera: deep recession of space alternating with human and architectural details projected forward”. Moreover, the montage effectively intimates the amalgamation of peoples and cultures populating the urban landscape in the early twentieth century. Multiple layers and perspectives fuse together to portray a complex industrialized system. Still, the mural maintains a sense of humanity; Shahn gives his figures a monumental quality through volume and scale. The urban architecture does not dwarf the people; instead, they work with the surroundings to build their own structure. Shahn captured the urgency for activism and reform, by showing gestures and mid-steps and freezing all the subjects in motion. This pictorial incorporation of “athletic pose and evocative asymmetry of architectural detail” is a Ben Shahn trademark.

Artworks

Artworks

• Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco Their Guards,1932, Collection of Miss Patricia Healey [1]
• Untitled (Houston Street Playground, New York City), 1932, Fogg Art Museum [2]
• W.C.T.U Parade, 1933-4, Museum of the City of New York [3]
• Jersey Homesteads Mural, 1937-38, Community Center of the Federal Housing Development, Roosevelt, New Jersey [4]
• Silent Music, 1938, Philips Collection, Washington DC. http://www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m442.htm
• Handball, 1939, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Fund)[5]
• The Meaning of Social Mural, 1940-2, Federal Security Building, Washington, DC. [6]
• For Full Employment after the War, Register-Vote, 1944, The Museum of Modern Art, New York [7]
• Allegory, 1948, Bill Bomar Collection [8]
• Age of Anxiety, 1953, The Joseph H. Hirschhorn Foundation, Inc.

Exhibitions

• “Ben Shahn: Paintings and Drawings,” 1930, Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York, New York
• “57th Annual American Exhibition: Water Colors and Drawings,” 1946, Tate Gallery in London, England
• “Ben Shahn: A Retrospective,” 1947, Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York
• “Esposizione Biennale internationale D’Arte XXVII,” 1954 in Venice, Italy
• “Ben Shahn,” 1962, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium; Galleria Nazionale D’arte Moderna in Rome, Italy; and Albertina in Vienna, Austria.
• “The Collected Prints of Ben Shahn,” 1969, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
• “Ben Shahn: A Retrospective Exhibition, ” 1969, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey.
• “Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times,” 2000-2001, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

See also

• List of AIGA medalists

Sources

• Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content, Harvard University Press 1957. ISBN 0674805658
• Susan Chevlowe, Common Man Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, Princeton University Press 1998. ISBN 0-691-00406-4
• Frances K. Pohl, Ben Shahn, Chameleon Books Inc. 1993. ISBN 1-56640-313-8

Bibliography

The Art Directors Club “1988 Fall of Fame: Ben Shahn.” 2007, 18 Mar. 2008 <http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1988/?id=231>.

Ben Shahn: Passion for Justice, PBS, 2002, 18 Mar. <2008http://www.njn.net/artsculture/shahn/>

Edwards, Susan. Ben Shahn at Harvard, “Ben Shahn's New Deal: The Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA)” Harvard University Art Museums, Sept, 1999, 18 March.2008 <http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/shahn/servlet/webpublisher.WebCommunication?ia=tr&ic=pt&t=xhtml&x=edwards>.

Kao, Deborah. Ben Shahn at Harvard “Ben Shahn's New York: The Photographs of Modern Times.” Harvard University Art Museums, Feb. 2000, 18 March. 2008 <http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/shahn/servlet/webpublisher.WebCommunication?ia=tr&ic=pt&t=xhtml&x=introthemes>.

Morse, John. Ben Shahn. New York: Praeger Pulbishers Inc, 1972.

Prescott, Kenneth. The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn. New York: Quadrangle, 1973.

Shahn, Ben. The Biography of Painting. New York: Paragraphic Books, 1966.

Soby, James. Ben Shahn Paintings. New York: George Braziller Inc., 1963.

Soby, James. The Penguin Modern Painters: Ben Shahn. West Drayton: Penguin Books Limited, 1947.

External links

• Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work
• Columbus Museum of Art Web page on Shahn’s Father Caughlin (click on picture for larger image)
• Ben Shahn documentary
• Ben Shahn at Harvard
• photographs of Ben Shahn and Louis Wickes Hine, from the Library of Congress
• Shahn poster