Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Ben Shahn experienced the 20th century at its worst.  Born in Czarist Russia to a suspected revolutionary who was exiled to Siberia, he and his mother eventually were reunited with his father in Brooklyn after fleeing what is now Lithuania.  It's no wonder that he felt a kinship with Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants with anarchist affiliations in Boston who became early, worldwide symbols of miscarried justice in America.  Trained as a lithographer, Shahn turned to social realism when he submitted a mural design about the pair to a competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art.  His depiction of an out-of-touch judiciary hypocritically feigning Christianity with lilies held above the corpses of two men they had condemned to death established him as one of his adopted nation's leading political artists.

"The Passion of Sacco & Vanzetti"  (1931-32)

As a retrospective at the Jewish Museum establishes, Shahn cast his eye for injustice far and wide. In San Francisco, where an Irish labor organizer had been convicted of murder despite a solid alibi and perjured testimony, he humanized the case with 16 paintings.  His work caught the attention of Diego Rivera with whom he worked on murals that proved to be too controversial for Rockefeller Center.

"The Mooney Case" (1932-33)

Look no further than these dignified portrayals of out-of-work and rural Americans for evidence of Shah's working class sympathies.

"Unemployed" (ca 1938)

"Harvesting Wheat" (1941)

Demagogues sometimes come in yellow instead of orange.  A photograph of Hitler making a speech inspired Shahn's caricature of the "Radio Priest" whose anti-Semitic invective reached 30 million listeners--nearly 25% of the U.S. population at the time--every week.

Father Coughlin (1939)

Shahn couldn't resist tweaking an art establishment that valued classical antiquity more than contemporary reality.  Inspired by his work as a government photographer who had been hired to document Roosevelt's New Deal, he hung the walls of this museum gallery with paintings of a nation whose citizens mostly labored in mines, on farms and in hospitals.  Shahn also may have been pissed that the Whitney had rejected his submission for what is now called the Biennial exhibition.  Like they say, "don't get mad, get even."  In the 21st century, some might criticize the Whitney for going too far in the other direction.

 

"Contemporary American Sculpture" (1940)

The collapse of the Vichy regime in France after the Allied march on Paris occasioned this characteristically anti-nationalistic work.  While the children swing joyfully above the rubble, the haunted expression of the girl in green illustrates the cost of war that victory alone can't erase.

"Liberationt" (1945)

Shahn recognized early on that Black churches would power the Civil Rights movement.

"The Church Is The Union Hall" (1946)

"We Shall Overcome" (1955)

When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Shahn repurposed an earlier drawing, adding an excerpt from the slain reverend's last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop." King spoke in support of sanitation workers on strike in Memphis.

Martin Luther King (with Stefan Martin, 1968)

Long before American Prometheus or the Christopher Nolan film based on it, Shahn captured the tortured ambivalence of the man who was hounded by Roy Cohn for his political past and who developed the atomic bomb.

Head of Oppenheimer (ca 1954)

The nuclear scientist and the social realist, both Jewish, were in complete agreement about the weapon's potential for destroying mankind, to no avail.  In 2025, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the world's doomsday clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it ever has been in the clock's 78-year history.

"Stop H Bomb Tests" (1960)

Hagiography doesn't appear to have been in Shahn's skill set; the justices on the Supreme Court who ruled that segregation in American schools was unconstitutional in Brown vs. the Board of Education appear almost puny and almost as white as the pillars of democracy behind them.

"Integration, Supreme Court" (1963)

Shahn clearly embraced his Judaism more fully as he aged.  He used this image, an allusion to the Kabbalah that jumbles together all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, to sign works during the last decade of his life.

"Alphabet of Creation" (1957)

Hallelujah, a book of 24 lithographs by Shahn published a year after his death provided a fitting end to his career.   It celebrated the Psalm 150:  Praise the Lord, Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power. Praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him for the sounding of the trumpet. Praise him with the harp and lyre. Praise him with tambourine and dancing. Praise him with the strings and flute. Praise him with the clash of cymbals. Praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

(1970)