SHAHN, BEN

The artist Benjamin Shahn (September 12, 1898–March 14, 1969) was born in Lithuania in the Pale of Settlement, the territory where Russian Jews were legally authorized to take up residence. His father was a furniture maker and craftsman. To escape pogroms (the officially-sanctioned massacres of Jews) the family fled Russia in 1906 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Much of Shahn's later artistic work retained elements of his Jewish background: windows for a temple in Buffalo, illustrations for a Passover prayer book, a series of watercolors on the Dreyfus affair, the frequent appearance of stylized Hebrew lettering in his painting.

At fifteen, Shahn left school to become apprenticed to a New York City lithographer. In his late teens and early twenties, however, he pursued his education doggedly. He went to night school for his high school diploma and attended classes at the Art Students League, New York University, and City College. He also received significant formal and informal education from two extended trips to Europe and North Africa (1924–1925 and 1927–1929).

By the time Shahn returned from Europe and began sharing a New York studio with the distinguished photographer Walker Evans, he was deeply committed to enlisting his artistic talent on behalf of liberal and radical social causes, portraying the travails of the poor and working classes, protesting corruption and injustice. In addition to his Dreyfus series (1930), he produced in 1932 a famous series of twenty-three gouache works depicting the trial and 1927 execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and another fifteen works in 1933 illustrating the case of Tom Mooney, the labor leader who was languishing in San Quentin prison after a questionable trial for a 1916 bombing in San Francisco. Shahn's artistic talent and political views brought him to the attention of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and the two worked together on the Rockefeller Center mural that was eventually destroyed after Rivera's refusal to remove a portrait of Vladimir I. Lenin. Two subsequent murals by Shahn (one on prohibition, the other on the history of imprisonment) were rejected by New York's Municipal Art Commission.

During the New Deal, Shahn worked on several government projects, principally under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. His work consisted of murals and thousands of photographs. The murals adorned post offices in the Bronx (1939) and Jamaica, New York (1939), the community center of a resettlement community in New Jersey (1938), and the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. (1942). Shahn's photographs movingly depicted the poverty of rural life in the South and Midwest. During World War II Shahn undertook projects for the Office of War Information and was also hired by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to produce pro-Roosevelt campaign posters for the 1944 election. His painting during the war, as might have been expected, was filled with condemnation of Nazism and sympathy for its victims. After the war he continued in various mediums his artistic advocacy of social causes. Shahn also taught at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and at Harvard University. By the time he died, his work had been widely exhibited, and Shahn had gained numerous honors and an international reputation as a leading social realist and a talented artist who used his considerable and multifaceted skills on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

SHAHN, BEN

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