Ben Shahn - part 7

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 - 6 also.

This is part 7 of a 12-part series on the works of Ben Shahn:

1968 For the Sake of a Single Verse from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
57 x 45 cm

1968 and Know the Gestures with which the Little Flowers open in the Morning
 from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
colour lithograph 57.2 x 44.8 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum

1968 Beside The Dead
from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
colour lithograph 64.8 x 48.3 cm

1968 Beside The Dying from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
colour lithograph 64.8 x 48.3 cm

1968 Childhood Illnesses from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
 lithograph 57.2 x 45.2 cm

1968 from the Rilke Portfolio:
 For the Sake of a Single Verse

1968 from the Rilke Portfolio:
 For the Sake of a Single Verse
57 x 45 cm

1968 from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse 
 57 x 45 cm

1968 Partings Long Seen Coming from the Rilke Portfolio:
 For the Sake of a Single Verse
colour lithograph 64.8 x 48.3 cm

1968 Screams Of Women In Labour from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
colour lithograph 64.8 x 48.3 cm

1968 The Comic Tradition in America
published by The Norton Library

1968 The Sea Itself from the Rilke Portfolio:
 For the Sake of a Single Verse colour
lithograph 64.8 x 48.3 cm

1968 Time magazine cover
Johann Sebastian Bach

1968 To Childhood Illnesses from the Rilke Portfolio:
 For the Sake of a Single Verse
colour lithograph 64.8 x 48.3 cm

1968 To Days of Childhood from the Rilke Portfolio:
For the Sake of a Single Verse
 colour lithograph 57.2 x 45.1 cm

1968 To Parents One had to Hurt
lithograph 57.2 x 45.1 cm

1969 The Coming of the French Revolution by George Lefebvre
published by Vintage Books

1969 Two Men Sitting
offset lithograph 38.1 x 30.5 cm

1969 War Resisters International
poster 88.6 x 58.1 cm

1969 War Resisters International
poster

1970s Saul Bellow series

Penguin Books:

1988 version
Love Sonnets

n.d. A Man and a Bridge
oil on board 25 x 20.7 cm

n.d. A Score of White Pigeons
offset lithograph 69.8 x 34.3 cm

n.d. Bountiful Harvest
tempera on board 96.5 x 71 cm

n.d. Boy with Ice Cream (Single Dip)
watercolour and ink on paper 51.4 x 41.9 cm

n.d. Coral Vets Series No. 15
ink on paper 15.2 x 27.3 cm
Albright-Knox, Buffalo, New York

n.d. Fireplace
 tempera on board 66 x 82.5 cm

n.d. Goyescas
watercolour on paper 98.5 x 64.8 cm

n.d. Head Study: A Diptych
ink on joined paper 33.3 x 46.4 cm

n.d. Homeric Struggle
brush and black ink, with brush and grey wash, on ivory wove paper 67.3 x 55.5 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

n.d. Houses on a Hill
ink and wash on paper 24.1 x 15.9 cm

n.d. Landscape with Tree
watercolour and charcoal on paper 45.7 x 30.5 cm

n.d. Levinson Books

n.d. Man Playing a Cithera (Psalm 150)
black ink on paper 101.5 x 64.8 cm

n.d. Mind in the Shadow
brush on paper 24.1 x 22.9 cm

n.d. Monroe Wheeler
brush and black ink on white wove paper 49.1 x 32.4 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

n.d. Scorched Earth
tempera on paper 15.2 x 32.3 cm

n.d. Second Phoenix
screenprint with watercolour additions 93.5 x 70.7 cm
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA

n.d. Sigmund Freud

n.d. Still Life with Grapes
oil on paper 31.8 x 25.4 cm

n.d. Study of a Child
ink on paper 13.6 x 14.9 cm
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

n.d. The Bridge
pencil and watercolour on paper 35.6 x 25.4 cm

n.d. The Fall (Icarus)
ink, wash and watercolour on paper 236.2 x 57.2 cm

n.d. Two Whispering Politicians
ink on paper 30.4 x 19.3 cm
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

n.d. Upright Piano
ink on paper 12.7 x 10.4 cm
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

n.d. Vanity
tempera on masonite 45.7 x 35.6 cm

n.d. Woman
brush on paper 21.4 x 16.5 cm

n.d. Women's Christian Temperance Union
gouache and ink on paper doily 19.6 x 13.2 cm