Ben Shahn Totally Explained

Everything about Ben Shahn totally explained

Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 - March 14 1969) was a Lithuanian Jewish-born American [[artist]. He is best known for his works of Social Realism, his leftist political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.

Biography

Ben Shahn was born in Kovno (Kaunas), Russian Empire, to Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shahn. His father was exiled to Siberia for alleged revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and his three younger siblings moved to Vilkomir (Ukmergė). In 1906, the family emigrated to America where they rejoined Hessel, who had fled Siberia. They settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. Shahn began his path to becoming an artist in New York, where he was first trained as a lithographer. Shahn's early experiences with lithography and graphic design is apparent in his later prints and paintings which often include the combination of text and image. Shahn's primary medium was egg tempera, popular among Social Realists. Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student on 1919, he went on to pursue art at City College in 1921 and then at the National Academy of Design. After his marriage to Tillie Goldstein in 1924, the two traveled through North Africa and then to Europe, where he made “ the traditional artist pilgrimage” . There he studied great European artists such as Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. Contemporaries who would make a profound impact on Shahn’s work and career include artists Walker Evans, Diego Rivera and Jean Charlot. The twenty-three gouache paintings of the trials of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time, rejecting academic prescriptions for subject matter. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti was exhibited in 1932 and received acclaim from both the public and critics. This series gave Shahn the confidence to cultivate his personal style, regardless of society’s art standards.

Work during the Great Depression

Shahn’s subsequent series of California labor leader Tom Mooney won him the recognition of Diego Rivera.

World War II and Beyond

During the war years of 1942-43, Shahn worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), but his pieces lacked the preferred patriotism of the day and only two of his posters were published. Shahn also began to act as a commercial artist for organizations such as CBS, Time, Fortune and Harper’s. His well-known 1965 portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on the cover of Time.
The artist was especially active as an academic in the last two decades of his life. After receiving honorary doctorates from Princeton and Harvard universities, he joined Harvard University as a Charles Eliot Norton professor in 1956. His essays and books were published; Shahn’s The Biography of Painting (1956), and The Shape of Content (1960), became influential works in the art world. As an alternative, he proposed an intimate and mutually beneficial relationship between artist and audience.
Shahn defended his choice to employ pictorial realities, rather than abstract forms. According to Shahn, known forms allow the artist “to discover new truths about man and to reaffirm that his life is significant.” Wit, candor and sentimentality give his images poignancy. By evoking dynamism, Shahn intended to inspire social change. Shahn stressed that in art, as in life, the combination of opposing orders is vital for progress. is apparent in his graphics, so too is his creativity. In fact, many of his paintings are inventive adaptations of his photography. Evocative juxtapositions characterize his aesthetic. He intentionally paired contrasting scales, colors, and images together to create tension. One signature example is seen in his play between industrial coolness and sympathetic portrayals.Handball demonstrates his “ use of architectural settings as both psychological foil to human figures and as expressive abstract pattern.” His art is striking but also introspective. He often captured figures engrossed in their own worlds. Many of his photographs were taken spontaneously, without the subject’s notice. Although, he used many mediums, his pieces are consistently thoughtful and playful.

Jersey Homesteads Mural

The Farm Security Administration commissioned Ben Shahn to paint a mural for the community center of Roosevelt, formerly Jersey Homesteads, a town in New Jersey initially planned to be a community for Jewish garment workers. Shahn’s move to the settlement demonstrates his dedication to the project as does his mural’s compelling depiction of the town’s founding.
   Three panels compose the mural. According to art historian Diane Linden, the panels’ sequence relates to that of the Haggadah, the Jewish sacred text, which follows a narrative of slavery, deliverance and redemption. More specifically, Shahn’s mural depicts immigrants’ struggle and advancement in the United States.
   The first panel shows the anti-Semitic and xenophobic obstacles American immigrants faced. During the global Depression, citizens of the United States struggled for their livelihoods. Because foreigners represented competition for employment, they were especially unwelcome. National immigrantion quotas also reflected the strained foreign relations of the United States at a time when Fascism, Nazism and Socialism were on the rise. To illustrate the political and social adversary, Shahn incorporated loaded iconography: Nazi soldiers, anti-Jewish signs and the executed Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti. Below, Shahn’s mother and Albert Einstein lead immigrants on a gangplank situated by the Ellis Island registry center and the Statue of Liberty. This section demonstrates the immigrants’ heroic emergence in the United States.
   The middle panel describes the poor living conditions awaiting immigrants after their arrival. On the right, Shahn depicts the inhuman labor situation in the form of “lightless sweatshops…tedious and backbreaking work with outmoded tools.” The crowd in the center of the composition represents labor unions and workers’ reform efforts. Here, a figure resembling labor leader John L. Lewis protests before the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Building, the site where the movement for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began. The lower right passageway marked ILGWU symbolizes a new and hopeful path, in United States, paved by unionized labor. In the last panel, the unions and the New Deal unite to create the blueprint for the town of the Jersey Homesteads. Various figures of social progress such as Sidney Hillman and Heywood Broun gather around the drafting table. Above them are images of the purposed cooperative farm and factory along with a campaign poster of Roosevelt, after whom the town was eventually named.
   Shahn’s biographer Soby notes “the composition of the mural at Roosevelt follows the undulant principle Shahn had learned from Diego Rivera: deep recession of space alternating with human and architectural details projected forward.” Moreover, the montage effectively intimates the amalgamation of peoples and cultures populating the urban landscape in the early twentieth century. Multiple layers and perspectives fuse together to portray a complex industrialized system. Still, the mural maintains a sense of humanity; Shahn gives his figures a monumental quality through volume and scale. The urban architecture doesn't dwarf the people; instead, they work with the surroundings to build their own structure. Shahn captured the urgency for activism and reform, by showing gestures and mid-steps and freezing all the subjects in motion. This pictorial incorporation of “athletic pose and evocative asymmetry of architectural detail” is a Ben Shahn trademark. While exemplifying his visual and social concerns, the mural characterizes the general issues of Shahn’s milieu.

Artworks

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco Their Guards,1932, Collection of Miss Patricia Healey (External Link)
Untitled (Houston Street Playground, New York City), 1932, Fogg Art Museum (External Link)
W.C.T.U Parade, 1933-4, Museum of the City of New York (External Link)
Jersey Homesteads Mural, 1937-38, Community Center of the Federal Housing Development, Roosevelt, New Jersey (External Link)
Silent Music, 1938, Philips Collection, Washington DC. http://www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m442.htm
Handball, 1939, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Fund)(External Link)
The Meaning of Social Mural, 1940-2, Federal Security Building, Washington, DC. (External Link)
For Full Employment after the War, Register-Vote, 1944, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (External Link)
Allegory, 1948, Bill Bomar Collection (External Link)
Age of Anxiety, 1953, The Joseph H. Hirschhorn Foundation, Inc.

Exhibitions

“Ben Shahn: Paintings and Drawings,” 1930, Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York, New York

“57th Annual American Exhibition: Water Colors and Drawings,” 1946, Tate Gallery in London, England

“Ben Shahn: A Retrospective,” 1947, Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York

“Esposizione Biennale internationale D’Arte XXVII,” 1954 in Venice, Italy

“Ben Shahn,” 1962, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium; Galleria Nazionale D’arte Moderna in Rome, Italy; and Albertina in Vienna, Austria.

“The Collected Prints of Ben Shahn,” 1969, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.

“Ben Shahn: A Retrospective Exhibition, ” 1969, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey.

“Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times,” 2000-2001, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Further Information

Get more info on 'Ben Shahn'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://ben_shahn.totallyexplained.com">Ben Shahn Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.