The Literal world of Ben Shahn

The Wall Street Journal

December 1, 1998

by Anne Midgette

(Copyright 1998, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

New York -- In 1947, Ben Shahn, then 49, became the youngest artist yet to have his own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; 1951 saw the publication of a Shahn biography; in 1954, he and Willem de Kooning were chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Shahn remained one of the most successful and best-known painters in America until his death in 1969. Today, while the New York art audience pays homage at the altars of Shahn's contemporaries Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, a modestly sized retrospective of this social realist at the Jewish Museum ("Common Man, Mythic Vision," up until March 7) seems to strike a tone of self-justification: Look, it proclaims, this was a very important artist, as if fearing that viewers might fail to notice it for themselves. 

And indeed, Shahn requires a context in order to be appreciated: the inevitable fate, perhaps, of an artist whose success in his own lifetime reflected a too-literal allegiance to a particular place and time that was not able, in the end, fully to transcend temporal boundaries and strike the chord of a larger truth about the human condition. 

There are wonderful things in Shahn's art, and some of the best of them came out early in his career, when the artist brought raw talent and dynamic line to his large, Rivera-influenced murals or his series "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," his most famous works. The current show begins right at the point when this unquestioning directness was starting to give over to a kind of self-conscious reflection, even a search for content. 

Representative of the early style is "East Side Soap Box," a gouache from 1936, actually a study for Shahn's 1938 mural of the Jewish experience in America at Jersey Homesteads in Roosevelt, N.J. The sketch has a compelling energy: The soapbox orator embodies a convincing force, anchoring the picture with a downward-pointing finger as the words he speaks seem to be illustrated, cartoon-style, in the Yiddish placard emerging from the sea of straw boaters that are his listeners. A photograph hanging next to the sketch shows the event Shahn is illustrating: labor leader John L. Lewis addressing a crowd. The image in the photograph is directly incorporated into the painting, given greater force in the process. 

Illustrative talent and a desire to make meaningful social commentary helped Shahn to renown as a social realist active in the WPA programs that supported many other like-minded artists in the 1930s. Throughout his career, one of Shahn's primary concerns was getting across a message, be it through the "fine arts" or by illustrating magazine articles and working on government propaganda posters during World War II. But this concern with message evidently held him back from fully developing some of his ideas in purely artistic, painterly terms. In the works in this show, drawn mainly from the later decades of his career, he arrives time and again at the brink of larger breakthroughs only to pull back, taking refuge in the haven of literal depiction and literal ideas. 

"A move from social realism to personal realism" is Shahn's own catchword that's often invoked to describe his development. But the most personal element in the later works is the painter's continual search for content that could give his work the same sense of certainty it radiated in the 1930s. In fact, the later paintings, protesting the horrors of World War II or of nuclear weaponry, are less personal, rather than more so, for the artist's self-conscious quest for higher truths led him to use an increasingly allegorical, symbolic language. In lieu of the specific characters and vignettes of "East Side Soap Box" or "Myself Among the Churchgoers" (1939), he began to create general archetypes: suffering but somehow anonymous citizens in a bombed-out "Italian Landscape" (1943-44) or a twisted, agonized Everyman threatened by the monstrous specter of nuclear destruction in "Second Allegory" (1953). 

Shahn was certainly more comfortable when he had something concrete to illustrate. In 1947, Harper's magazine commissioned him to create drawings to accompany an article about a mining accident that had claimed 111 lives; this story, and the 1961 tale of the "Lucky Dragon," a Japanese fishing boat that inadvertently strayed into a nuclear testing ground at the time of a detonation, moved Shahn deeply, and he created a number of paintings about both incidents. One senses a palpable sense of relief in these works as the artist returns from his more thematically abstract, weighty meditations on art and life ("Composition for Clarinets and Tin Horn," 1951; "Man," 1952) to some of his old immediacy. The catch is that these remain at the level of mere illustration because the viewer needs to turn to other sources -- the stories themselves -- to understand what is going on. 

Having a story was an important anchor for an artist committed to realism in an increasingly abstract art world. Shahn's technical potential, his painterliness, was on a high level: He had a wonderful sense of line and an ability to assimilate and process a range of influences (a shockingly beautiful "Heron of Calvary No. 1" from 1962 shows him working masterfully with Japanese calligraphic technique). But he seems to have hesitated at following through on the full implications of his painterly ideas, perhaps partly for fear of betraying the realist bent so essential to his artistic sensibility. The hands of the laborers in "Sunday Painting" (1938) or "1943 A.D." have the same colossal grace as those of Picasso's "Desmoiselles d'Avignon"; in 1948, he created, in "Allegory," a lion-monster in very much the pose and spirit of Jackson Pollock's slightly earlier "The She-Wolf." But where Pollock followed the call of paint and went on to explode his later canvases into a web of drips, Shahn followed the call of subject, and his lion-monster dwindled into a recurring cipher that appeared in painting after painting to symbolize nuclear destruction, defanged through its very repetition. 

A novelist once said, "Never set out to write a great book; just try to write the best book you can." Shahn was constantly trying to make great paintings, significant statements on Jewish tradition, nuclear holocaust, the role of the artist; and he kept tripping over his own aspirations. The desire to illustrate a weighty event sometimes collided with the desire to paint: "Death of a Miner" (1949) is just one example of a Shahn canvas with some lovely brushwork that has little relation to the figures episodically imposed on the canvas's ground. 

When Shahn was able to relax his own grasp on importance, he produced some gorgeous work. One of the loveliest and most evocative paintings in the show is the quiet "Bookshop" of 1953. Here, in a simple picture of a blue-shawled mother and child emerging from between the plate-glass windows of a red-painted Hebrew bookstore, Shahn hit the fusion of form and content that eluded him in other works: His line defines the space enclosing the figures, his brushwork becomes the tantalizingly opaque surface of the plate-glass, concealing the wealth of knowledge within the store from the viewer. This almost casual moment becomes an artlessly eloquent meditation on Jewish tradition, motherhood, the division of pictorial space through line and color, and other accidental profundities, showing the artist at his best. ustomers can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. Clearly list and describe the services you offer. Also, be sure to showcase a premium service.