Ben Shahn - part 4

Ben Shahn by Ida Kar
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist and member of the Social Realist movement. His expressive figurative paintings, murals, and posters were inexorably tied to his pursuit of social justice and lifelong activism within leftist political beliefs. Shahn unflinchingly critiqued the government and society, as seen in his The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932), a painting which condemned the controversial conviction of two Italian-American immigrants who were sentenced to death in 1927. “The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual—that he is civilised, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts,” he once stated. “And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public—to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values.” 

Born in 1898 in Kaunas, Lithuania into an Orthodox Jewish family, he and his family emigrated to New York in 1906. Shahn went on to study at the National Academy of Design in New York and travelled throughout Europe during the 1920s. Upon his return to the United States, he assisted Diego Rivera in 1933 for the painting of his Man at the Crossroads fresco in Rockefeller Center. During the latter part of his career, the artist’s paintings became more symbolic of his own emotional state rather than a description of social injustices. 

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. A series on his photographs will feature in the back end of these posts on Shahn.

He died in March 1969 in New York City. Today, Shahn’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

For earlier works by Ben Shahn see parts 1 - 3 also.

This is part 4 of a 12-part series on the works of Ben Shahn:

1957 Supermarket No.1
screenprint 67.6 x 101.6 cm (image)

1957 Supermarket No.1
screenprint 67.6 x 101.6 cm (image)

1957 The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre
Vintage Books

1957 The Crucial Decade - And After
Vintage Books

1957 The Funhouse by Benjamin Appel
Ballantine Books

1957 The Road to Miltown or Under the Spreading Atrophy by S.J. Perelman

1957 The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. A Harvard Paperback:

The Shape of Content
Front Cover

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content

1958 Ounce Dice Trice bt Alastair Reid

Drawings by Ben Shahn :

1958 Ounce Dice Trice
Front Cover

Ounce Dice Trice
Title Page Cover

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

Ounce Dice Trice

1958 Poem of Ecstasy
tempera on board 130.8 x 76.2 cm

1958 Three Penny Opera
pen and ink and watercolour on paper laid down on board 36.2 x 36.2 cm

1958c Wheat Field 
lithograph with hand-colouring 49.6 x 90.2 cm

1959 After Titian
tempera on fibreboard 136 x 77.5 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

1959 Ballets U.S.A.
silkscreen and photolithograph 54.6 x 79.7 cm
MoMA, New York

1959 Barbed Wire Paradise
gouache on paper laid down on board 34.3 x 22.9 cm

1959 Cat's Cradle
screenprint 52.1 x 67 cm
MoMA, New York

1959 The American Experience by Henry Bamford Parkes
Vintage Books

1959 Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith
Vintage Books

1959c Cat's Cradle in Blue
egg tempera on composition board 101 x 65.4 cm
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

1960 Futility
wood engraving on Japan paper
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

1960 Political Man by Seymour Martin Lipset
Doubleday Anchor Books

1960 Stop H Bomb Tests
silkscreen poster 111.8 x 88.9 cm

1960 Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
Vintage Russian Library

c1960 Untitled (Figures seated at a table)
watercolour verso

c1960 Untitled (Figures seated at a table)
watercolour

1961 Look magazine
"... Unless we clear our eyes there is not going to be a reconizable future at all."