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Born in Kovno, Lithuania, Ben Shahn's early
education was informal, consisting mainly of studying passages from the Bible.
Copying biblical texts as a child inspired a lifelong interest in lettering
and calligraphy, and many of his compositions use words, names, and quotations
as formal elements. Shahn's family immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, when
he was eight. As a teenager, Shahn was apprenticed to a lithographer, becoming
attuned to considering typesetting as composition, letters as shapes in space,
and nuances of line. The spiky sensitive draftsmanship that characterizes
his art reflects these experiences. Between 1919 and 1922 he studied at New
York University; the City College of New York, a free college; and the National
Academy of Design. Sharing a studio in 1929 with the photographer Walker Evans
stimulated Shahn's own interest in photography; he began photographing people
and street scenes, first in New York and later around the country. These photographs
served as the basis for many of his prints and paintings. In 1932-1933, Shahn
assisted the Mexican artist Diego Rivera on an important series of murals
depicting labor and industry for New York's Rockefeller Center. Shahn was
employed by the Works Progress Administration in the mid-1930s to design a
mural for a federal prison; although that project was never realized, he received
many other private and public mural commissions in subsequent years. Shahn's
late works concentrate on universal religious themes--creation and the relationship
between the individual and God. A print such as Alphabet of Creation reflects
his personal interest in subjects from the Old Testament and Hebrew liturgy,
as well as his continued interest in letters as visual elements.
One of the leading social realists of the twentieth century, Ben Shahn's art
is one of protest against injustice and prejudice. His paintings and prints
address social and political issues, focusing on the poor and disenfranchised
whom he portrays with sympathy. The subjects of his earliest work are victims
of political injustice such as Sacco and Vanzetti. From the 1930s on, Shahn's
art has been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions in the major art museums
in New York, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, and Vienna.
For a period of forty years Ben Shahn was
the preeminent painter-as-critic in American art. Such was his strength
in this role that he retained his prominence throughout the era that saw
the rise and flowering of American Abstraction. In 1954 he shared the American
pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Willem de Kooning. In a sense, Shahn
is the summation of the entire tradition of Social Realism in our art,
which reached its fullest development under federal sponsorship in the
years of the Depression and World War II. In the matter of his sources
as an artist one needs only to know of his beginnings as an immigrant,
of his initial training as a journeyman lithographer, of his first artistic
apprenticeship with Diego Rivera on the controversial Rockefeller Center
mural project in New York, and of his incessant study of the artistic past--in
particular the Italian muralists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
From his first conspicuous entry on the art scene with his 1932 paintings
of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of the 1920s to the end of his career he
was dedicated to an understanding of the social events taking place around
him. What is perhaps most important in this dedication is his extraordinary
skill in the translation of these events into images of symbolic power.
The subject matter of social struggle, war, poverty, and politics has seldom
received comparable embodiment in our art.
Museum Links to
Ben Shahn's artwork:
National
Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco
Harvard University
Art Museums
Hofstra
Museum at Hofstra University, New York
Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth, Texas
Museum of the City of New
York
National Museum of American
Art, Washington D.C.
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery
at the University of Nebraska
Southern Alleghenies Museum
The Jewish Museum,
New York
Weisman Art Museum
at the University of Minnesota
Williams
College Museum of Art, Massachusetts
Wright
Museum of Art at Beloit College, Wisconsin
Image Archives:
Detroit
Institute of Arts Image Database
Tigertail
Virtual Museum
University
of Michigan SILS Art Image Browser
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