Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity
Through October 12
The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street
New York
The exhibit reveals both Shahn’s depth and his complexity. He considered himself a fine artist but also did a lot of commercial illustration and design. He identified with the working class and did posters for labor unions yet also had corporate clients. His work was often political (like his contemporaneous Mexicans), but he also paid close attention to matters of abstract form and structure (like the European avant-garde). His work was secular yet was characterized by aspirations for social justice informed by his Jewish heritage (only occasionally did he paint clearly biblical subjects or illuminate Jewish liturgical texts).
This show was originally organized by the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and was the first major retrospective of Shahn’s work in Spain since the end of fascism in that country in 1975. The exhibit and its catalogue effectively represent the breadth of Shahn’s work and the almost equal attention he pays to his career as an illustrator/graphic designer. My only criticism of the exhibit, as it is installed at the Jewish Museum, is that it seems crowded. When there are many people in the galleries, it is difficult to really see the work (much of it is small and shown in vitrines). I wish the museum would have dedicated more than just one floor to this exhibition.
During the 1930s and early 1940s Shahn worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (the WPA), and his painting Wheat Harvesting of 1941 is one study for a series of large murals he executed at the Social Security Administration in Washington, D.C. Most murals by artists during this period were painted in the studio with oil on canvas, which would later be glued to the wall. But here Shahn used the older method of buon fresco, painted directly into the fresh plaster before it had thoroughly set up. (This is the same traditional technique used in the murals by Michelangelo and Raphael at the Vatican.)
Although laboring-class men at work is a subject often portrayed in WPA murals, Shahn’s treatment in this fresco study is less realistic than most of the painting done for this federal agency and shows greater familiarity with European modernist trends. The industrial farm worker in this piece is expressively distorted in a way that flattens him out. Notice his unnaturally broad shoulders and small right arm, depicted with ambiguous foreshortening.
This two-dimensional quality is underscored by the fruit tree behind him that has a decorative sensibility right out of Matisse. It seems to push forward from the background to the surface plane with the figure. Even the harvesting equipment on the left is flattened out and bending in a way that mirrors the man’s arm. The worker and his machine are one; they are mediated by nature’s bounty, represented by the fruit tree, and cultivated like the wheat by human ingenuity and labor. The painting represents a true marriage of social-realist content wed to a moderately modernist style, qualities that characterize Shahn’s earlier, prewar work.
In Second Allegory, a postwar piece painted in 1953 during the height of the Cold War and the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Shahn refused to conform to this non-objective style that dominated the art world of that time. By incorporating figuration along with abstraction, the painting suggests a more complex narrative, implying an existential message that had social and even religious overtones.
The painting, over four feet tall, depicts a terrified man cowering on the ground, while a huge finger descends from above and points directly in the man’s face, which he covers anxiously with one hand, while his other hand pushes upward in a gesture of defensive, futile resistance. It is as if God were indicating to the man that he and only he is responsible for his life, his decisions, his actions, and not merely himself alone, but also for the whole of society. As Sartre states in Being and Nothingness:
When we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he, through his actions, is responsible for all men.
In postwar existentialism, both freedom and responsibility ultimately lie with the individual.
The abstract cloud from which the menacing hand descends resembles, in its wavering, hovering, transparent forms, the motion of flickering flames and suggests both the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses but also, more ominously, the mushroom cloud of nuclear annihilation that seemed to hang over everything in the early 1950s; a promise of freedom mingled with the fear of disaster.
According to the label at the museum, it may also have indicated the loss of civil liberties during the postwar “Red Scare” in the United States. (Shahn had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for his involvement with the Artist’s Union and as part of the “United Front” against the rise of fascism between the wars.)
Despite Shahn’s resistance to conforming his artistic language to the predominant movements of the time, his semi-abstract style retains a surprising sense of continuity over the decades, demonstrated by the quantity and quality of work included in this definitive retrospective exhibition. Whether using fresco or egg tempera (a method he did a great deal to revive) or other, more conventional media, his work embodies a sense of resistance while it encourages taking responsibility for our actions as individuals, as a society, and as believers (or unbelievers) accountable to a power greater than ourselves.
Dr. Dennis Raverty is a retired professor of art history whose work has been published in Art Journal, Art in America, International Review of African American Art, Women’s Art Journal, Illustration Magazine, and Art Papers, where he was a contributing editor.
