Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969
American painter, photographer and lithographer of Lithuanian birth. He was born into a family of Jewish craftsmen who emigrated in 1906, settling in New York. From 1913 to 1917 Shahn served as an apprentice in Hessenberg’s Lithography Shop in Manhattan, and in the evenings he attended high school in Brooklyn. In 1916 he enrolled in a life-drawing class at the Art Students League. After studying biology, first at New York University (1919) and then at City College, New York (1919–22), he entered the National Academy of Design to pursue a career as an artist (1923).
After marrying in 1922, Shahn travelled with his wife to North Africa, Spain, Italy and France (1924–5; 1927–9), where he studied both the art of the past and the works of Matisse, Dufy, Rouault, Picasso and Klee. On his return from Europe in 1925 they moved to Brooklyn Heights. There he met Walker Evans, with whom he began to share a studio. Also in 1925 he began to spend summers in the art colony of Truro, near Provincetown, MA, painting beach scenes and landscapes. He was dissatisfied with his paintings of this period, so much so that he declined an invitation to exhibit at the Montross Gallery in 1926, feeling that his work was still too derivative of the European painters that he had studied (e.g. Little Church, c. 1925; Newark, NJ, Mus.).
Shahn’s first one-man exhibition was held in 1930 at the Downtown Gallery, New York, and consisted of paintings made on the island of Djerba, off Tunisia. After returning from North Africa in 1929, he became convinced that he wanted his art to refer to contemporary life. In Paris he had bought a small book on the Dreyfus case, and his interest in the trials led to 13 watercolours on the Dreyfus theme, including Captain Dreyfus (1930; Princeton, NJ, Dorothea Greenbaum priv. col., see Shahn, 1972, p. 122). Shahn became known as a social realist in 1932 following the exhibition of a series of 23 gouache paintings entitled the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (e.g. Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, New York, MOMA). They are characterized by strong linearity and use distortion as an expressive conveyer of emotion. In the theme of the trials and execution of immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, which became a cause célèbre of intellectuals in the 1920s, Shahn felt he had discovered a contemporary subject analogous to the crucifixion of Christ.
In 1933 Shahn painted a similar series about the trials in 1916 of San Francisco labour leader, Tom Mooney, and in 1933 he assisted Diego Rivera on the frescoes for the Rockefeller Center in New York, but they were removed when they were discovered to contain a portrait of Lenin. During the 1930s and 1940s Shahn painted murals for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP; see fig.) and was also employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA.; 1935–8) to document the plight of American agricultural workers (e.g. Cotton Pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas, 1935; see Pratt, p. 39). Many of Shahn’s lithographs were linked to his photographs and his experience with the FSA, such as Years of Dust (1936; see Prescott, 1982, pl. x). His later work shows an increased interest in Hebraic subjects, for example Identity (mixed media on paper, 1968; Madrid, Mus. Thyssen-Bornemisza). In 1956 Shahn held the Charles Norton Chair of Poetics at Harvard University and his lectures summarizing his artistic philosophy of realism were published as The Shape of Content (Cambridge, MA, 1957). [M. Sue Kendall. "Shahn, Ben." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T077970.]
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