Ben Shahn

“I’m stubborn. I paint two things: what I love and what I abhor.”

Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was a social realist painter, printmaker, muralist, and photographer best known for his crisp lines and exaggerated figures—heavily influenced by Cubism and graphic design—as well as a thematic focus on political injustice. Shahn tended to call what he did personal realism, as opposed to social realism. Diego Rivera wrote of Shahn that he “humanized the technical methods of the Paris painters.”

Born in Kovno, Lithuania, the son of a woodcarver, Shahn and his family immigrated to Brooklyn when he was eight. By age 15 he was an apprentice in a lithography shop, and by 21 he’d saved enough to pursue a wide-ranging education at NYU, CUNY, and the National Academy of Design. Through the mid to late 20s he took whirlwind art tours of Europe and North Africa. He returned to Brooklyn in 1929, sharing a studio with photographer Walker Evans, and pursuing art in the US in earnest.

1932-33 was a breakout period for Shahn. Diego Rivera asked him to work on the Man at the Crossroads Rockefeller mural, and the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition featuring Shahn’s 23-painting series about Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian immigrants and anarchists who were executed after being accused of murder. 

The Depression saw Shahn working on numerous mural commissions, including one for Riker’s Island that was never realized. In 1935 he was hired by the Resettlement Administration to travel around the South and take photographs—these images served as direct inspiration for his later paintings.

Shahn’s art shifted following WWII, taking on a more symbolic and allegorical bent. Although Abstract Expressionism also started to gain a significant foothold following the war, Shahn remained a respected artist. Look magazine named him one of the top ten American painters in 1948, and MoMA chose him and Willem de Kooning to represent America at the 1954 Venice Biennale. In the late 50s and early 60s, Shahn designed sets for several Jerome Robbins ballets and an e e cummings play, and held posts teaching at institutions like Black Mountain College and Harvard University.