Ben Shahn: 'Common Man, Mythic Vision'

By Charles Keller

"Common Man, Mythic Vision, The Paintings of Ben Shahn," The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York City through March 7. (closed Fridays and Saturdays).

Ben Shahn, born in Lithuania in 1896, emigrated with his poor Jewish family to the United States in 1906.

His father, a socialist, settled the family and found odd jobs on New York City's lower East Side. At age 15, Ben worked in a small lithographic print shop and went to school at night. The print shop gave him experience in typography, calligraphy and graphic design which served his fluid imagery throughout his life.

In Franklin Roosevelt's "radical" program of employing artists during the Depression, Shahn became an expert photographer with the Housing Rehabilitation Administration (1935-38) as he focused on jobless farmworkers and factory workers. He later used these photographs as subjects for paintings.

During World War II Shahn painted posters for the Office of War Information and later for the CIO's political action committee.

A basic tenet of Shahn's philosophy as "hatred of injustice" which was fueled daily by the news headlines and the breadlines of the victims of an unfair, violent society.

Historic events such as the Dreyfus Affair in France and class-war events at home such as the frame-up imprisonment of Tom Mooney and the outrageous death sentences of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s aroused Shahn's indignation and inspired his severe narrative painting style.

The insanity of war, the inhumanity of industry and the horror of the Bomb - all confirmed Shahn's need to cry out and condemn. At the same time, Shahn was frustrated by a sense of the inadequacy of graphic description and narrative reportage. How does one paint the Holocaust, the Cold War? How does one personalize the statistics of genocide and the soundtrack of torture?

The waste, the alienation, cynicism and opportunism so rampant in our society drove Shahn into more subjective forms of personal expression. He sought to identify with the universal symbolism of allegories, mythologies and the Bible. While the DeKoonings, Rothkos and Pollocks retreated into exercises of trying to organize the chaotic mysteries of life, Shahn continued heroically to grapple with the intangibles: human behavior, the burdens of live and dead traditions, the enduring humanity of the Jewish heritage, and an almost desperate belief in the regenerative power of art.

Shahn had a powerful influence on the artists of his generation and on students, including myself, in the next.

Particularly memorable among the 50 plus paintings and illustrations are the preliminary component scenes for the mural, "Immigration Story" commissioned for the (New) Jersey Homestead's Garment Workers' Community, the bleak poetic scenes of Italian children playing in the ruins of war's aftermath and the series dealing with the Japanese tuna fishermen, victims of the fallout from the hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in 1954.

Also memorable are "Blind Musician," an accordion player mourning the death of FDR, "Death of a Miner," the stark 1949 confrontation between management and also the families after the Centralia blast which left 111 dead, and "Tom Mooney and the Warden."

Shahn's symbols of fire and destruction, his paintings of children, of lonely people, of musical instruments, thistles, wheatfields, Hebrew lettering, clowns and fierce, mythical animals cover the walls with color, architectural details and tender sentiment.

Shahn has captured the confusion, the despair and the hopes of an immigrant population that has become absorbed into the kaleidoscopic culture that is America.

- Charles Keller