We live in the age of Ben Shahn.
Who? snooty formalists steeped in the cloudy matcha of our unprincipled era might ask. One answer: Ben Shahn was the grandaddy of American socially conscious art, a dynamic painter, utilitarian photographer, inspired printer, OG muralist (he assisted Diego Rivera on his ill-fated “Man At the Crossroads” fresco, at Rockefeller Center), and reluctant ad man who surfed a global economic meltdown, several wars, and multiple national and international crises, along with the disruption of conventional politics from the 1930s through the ’60s. Like George Orwell, another lodestar of creative integrity and free expression, Shahn used his art to regularly skewer society and depict the travails of ordinary people. To paraphrase a wartime Winston Churchill, Shahn also never gave up and never gave in — despite attacks from the McCarthyite right and the Stalinist left — while insisting on, with the permission of culture critic Clement Greenberg, an umbilical cord of decency between advanced art and humanist ethics.
A singular interpreter of 20th-century anxieties that have Proud Boy-ed themselves into the 21st, Shahn was not shy about making art from the more calamitous events endured by him and his contemporaries. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, his family fled the czar’s empire for America after his father was dispatched to a Siberian gulag. After settling in impoverished Williamsburg, Brooklyn — what would he make, one wonders, of the $24 margaritas slung at the hip nabe’s William Vale Hotel today? — Shahn trained as a teen lithographer, studied biology at NYU (the STEM training of its day), and subsequently returned, more convinced than ever, to the critical-symbolic power of art. Formal painting classes followed, then the European tour. Along with thousands of wet-behind-the-ears Americans, he diligently ogled — or better put, rubbernecked — the radical doings of, among other avant-gardists, Matisse, Dufy, Rouault, Picasso, and Klee.
This was in the 1920s, a decade before Europe backslid into what we might today term full accelerationist mode. To paraphrase the British band Steps’ 2020 synth-pop hit “Tell Me What the Future Holds,” Shahn used art — most specifically, picture-making — to face squarely forward while confronting the seismic shocks of a convulsive present. Still to come: the stock market crash of 1929, the Dust Bowl, Jim Crow, the rise of fascism, the bloodletting of WWII and the Holocaust, the Cold War and the resulting muzzling of free speech in both East and West, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the struggle for civil rights, the assassinations of America’s acronymic martyrs — JFK, X, MLK, and RFK — and the rise and fall of independence and anti-colonial movements throughout the world.
Shahn’s modest-sized painting packs the punch of a giant Anselm Kiefer canvas.
In Ezra Pound’s words, “the age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace”; perhaps, in Baudelaire’s phrase, a “Painter of Modern Life.” Shahn’s no-brow synthesis of European and American vanguardism — a mix of realism, muralism, cubism, surrealism, and a knack for using magazine-ready images — delivered powerfully and on both counts. Notably, his art also reached hungry audiences beyond connoisseurs’ drawing rooms and the museum. Where other artists’ contributions remain routinely pegged to their time’s formal developments, Shahn’s encapsulated an era of righteous real-world protest, from the railroading of labor-union innocents like Tom Mooney to the immigrant-baiting of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to the systematic bloodletting of the Vietnam War. Also crucial to Shahn’s success: His temperas, gouaches, drawings, lithographs, and photographs eschewed isms for a vivid style that anticipated the distilled conviction of younger Black artists, such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. Today, 56 years after his death, Shahn remains among the few white American artists of his or our time capable of painting politics with the zeal, particular and universal, of canon-busters Robert Colescott, Faith Ringgold, and Kerry James Marshall.
As Shahn himself put it, he believed he could speak to the “six million people who understood Norman Rockwell” and to the “sixty [who] understand Picasso’s Guernica.” The idea still rankles New York’s more conservative art precincts — cue the contagious yawn. Last month, a snide critic in the pages of The New Yorker insisted on divorcing form from content in response to Shahn’s art, and, one imagines, wet from water. Medium and message, on the other hand, dovetailed and thrived for decades in Shahn’s work. By the time the engagé painter became the nation’s most popular artist — after numerous public murals, reams of magazine spreads, frequent TV appearances, and a critically lauded 1947 MoMA retrospective — Shahn hadn’t just topped the wall separating the layperson and the specialist, he’d bulldozed it. (In an art world split indecision, realist Shahn and abstractionist Willem de Kooning represented the United States jointly at the 1954 Venice Biennale.)
At midcentury — starting with his MoMA survey and until his death, in 1969 — Shahn dominated the public consciousness far more than high-culture heavyweights like abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. His socially committed vision was fed by progressive politics but also by his recognition of the mass media’s tsunami-like power, aspects of his lengthy career favored by the Jewish Museum’s Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity, the first U.S. survey of the artist’s work in half a century. Brilliantly organized by curator Laura Katzman, the exhibition weaves Shahn’s paintings and photography into a resilient tapestry. It combines, among other period visuals, press photos of Spanish Republican refugees with images the artist captured himself in the 1930s, while working as a photographer alongside Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration (precursor to the Farm Security Administration), the New Deal agency Franklin D. Roosevelt created in 1935 to combat rural poverty. Three decades before Andy Warhol filched newspaper reproductions of a presidential widow for his Nine Jackies (1964), Shahn turned photo images into critical source material for his powerful paintings.
Shahn frequently seems to be wielding a chisel or an X-Acto knife rather than a brush.
Few exhibitions draw the relation between wall and vitrine as sharply as Katzman’s survey. Besides providing a breadcrumb trail of books, magazines, clippings, and other ephemera produced by the painter-polemicist, the exhibition directly connects appropriated period photographs with the artist’s own painterly compositions. In Shahn’s hands, a 1918 National Geographic magazine reproduction of a soapbox orator on the streets of New York’s Madison Square turns into a sparer 1936 painting — a sea of white hats spread like Queen Anne’s Lace below an uncapped fireplug of a speaker in a crisp shirt and dark tie. The fact that the figure’s hand points down to the ground, in the manner of a Christian saint, links the composition to older stories of struggle and sacrifice, while reinforcing the artist’s indebtedness to Renaissance iconography.
Nowhere is Shahn’s original approach to the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction more in evidence than in his use of the 1935 black-and-white photo he took of Sam Nichols, an Arkansas tenant farmer whose features are so deeply lined they resemble topography. Nichols’s hand-on-crumpled-mouth pose — today it would be reduced to a meme, or worse, an emoji — appears in no less than three paintings in the exhibition. Among these, one tempera on board work features Nichols’s likeness, two spiky strips of barbed wire, and half a dozen workers performing backbreaking labor. Titled, fittingly, 1943 AD, Shahn’s modest-sized painting packs the punch of a giant Anselm Kiefer canvas. At tabloid scale, it refers directly to early official reports of the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis, an event treated sparingly by visual artists then, as now. (The Boston Globe was among the first U.S. newspapers to report on the Nazi genocide; its June 26, 1942, edition featured — albeit near the bottom of page 12 — the rare explicit headline: “Mass Murders of Jews in Poland Pass 700,000 Mark.”)
Shahn’s paintings might have relied on photographic source material, but they were hardly photorealistic. His signature irregular line is described as “artisanal” in the exhibition catalog, by which the curator presumably means handmade, jagged, and related to the artist’s early training as a lithographer. (Legendary Renaissance scholar Roberto Longhi would have called it a “functional line.”) From the start, Shahn’s brushwork was intended to look uneven, his colors paint-roller patchy. A drawing shorthand the artist adopted — along with telescoped space and flat, collagelike shapes — these distinct visual elements remain, decades after their sources’ first printing, both powerfully slapdash and evergreen. Another characteristic of Shahn’s rugged forms and figures: He frequently seems to be wielding a chisel or an X-Acto knife rather than a brush.
Adapted from a 2023–24 Shahn retrospective organized by Katzman at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, On Nonconformity takes its title from the fourth of Shahn’s six Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he delivered in 1956 and 1957 (collected and published by Harvard University in 1957 under the title The Shape of Content). In that text, the polemical painter described the conformity associated with “artists overwhelmed by the nearest outstanding figure” and the sheeple orthodoxies “derived from the wholly venal business of catering to a popular market.” Shahn’s principled personal reading of noncompliance was more iconoclastic and practical — nonconformity is an indispensable precondition for great artistic production and social change.
For those searching for a major American artist who lived and painted the art of his time vigorously and unflinchingly, a career blueprint is now on view uptown. ❖
Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity
The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street
Through October 26
Christian Viveros-Fauné has covered art and its intersections with politics for the Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years.
