When I was getting ready to leave for college in 1968, a friend gave me a gift, a poster showing a harlequin-like figure standing on the back of a white horse while lettering his name on a clouded patch of sky. Though not everyone would have recognized the lively, quivering “blotted line” delineating the self-portrait of the Jewish artist Ben Shahn, for me the poster was filled with meaning. Ben Shahn was, and had been for several decades, in the forefront of the American Progressive movement and was known as an artist of conscience. The poster had originally served as an announcement for Shahn’s last show at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in Manhattan in the mid-1950s, but the harlequin striving for equilibrium was a good emblem to carry into the vividly unsettling world I was about to enter at college, where Bob Dylan’s craggy voice could be heard singing “Maggie’s Farm” at all hours of the day and night, and everyone seemed to be exploring ways of becoming free from orthodoxy, inhibition and conformity.
Everyman, 1954, tempera and oil on canvas mounted to composition board, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, 56.5. © 2025 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
“On Nonconformity” was, in fact, the heading of one of the Norton Lectures that Shahn gave at Harvard University, and it is the title of the new Shahn retrospective that runs through October 12 at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The show is intended to explore the relevance of Shahn’s work today and his commitment to social justice during an era that, like our own, was politically explosive. Shahn was born in Kovno (today, Kaunas), Lithuania, in 1898 and died in New York City in 1968. The exhibition contains 175 of his paintings, drawings, graphic works, books and photos, as well as source materials from pamphlets, magazines and news clippings. All of this provides insight into Shahn’s unusual method of working, for which he kept a picture bank that provided prototypes he would adapt and reinterpret through his paintings. He might enlarge the fleshy palm of a laborer’s hand to emphasize its well-worn strength, or tilt a gaunt-looking child’s torso forward, so it seems to loom disconcertingly over the viewer, but he liked to paint from the rich information a camera lens supplied. Walking through the installation, I was intrigued to see an iteration of the harlequin I knew so well in a painting called Everyman. Tenuously balanced in an acrobatic pyramid, not entirely upside down but arching impossibly long legs high into the air, the figure resists the laws of the physical universe to obtain a defiant balance.
In his youth and among his peers, Shahn was known as a force of nature. For awhile in the early 1930s, the great pioneering and soft-spoken American photographer Walker Evans shared a studio and living space with Shahn. In a Smithsonian Oral History interview, Evans talked about his admiration for Shahn’s work and the warm attachment they had for one another, but he also spoke about how he found Shahn’s forcefulness overpowering. Like many Jewish-American cultural figures of his generation, Shahn’s character was forged by the turmoil of the last years of the Russian Empire and the trauma of the immigrant experience. In 1902, while his family was still living in Kovno, Shahn’s father, an artisan wood carver and an observant Jew, was arrested by the tsar’s police for suspected revolutionary activities and sentenced to exile in Siberia. When the family then went to live in Vilkomir (now known as Ukmergė), the provincial town of his parents’ birth, Shahn witnessed a village fire spread through the fast-vanishing world of his childhood. “I remember the excitement, the flames breaking out everywhere,” he said in one of his Harvard lectures, “the lines of men passing buckets to and from the river which ran through the town, the madwoman who had escaped from someone’s house during the confusion, and whose face I saw, dead-white in all the reflected color.”
Integration, Supreme Court might not have had the same effect at another time, but today, the painting celebrating the most liberal court’s groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision is astonishing.
In 1906, with his mother and brother and sister, Shahn emigrated to America. Miraculously, they were reunited with his father, who had escaped expulsion, making his way to South Africa and then to New York and Brooklyn, which was then a teeming ghetto of Jewish refugees. Like many new immigrants, the family was preyed upon by swindlers who convinced them to invest in real estate and business deals where they lost what little money they had. Because of one of those failed ventures, they moved to a building adjacent to a barn, and when it caught fire, Shahn’s father climbed through a drainpipe to reach his children, who were surrounded by flames. Carrying them one by one to safety, he scorched his face and hands, becoming severely disfigured and disabled for the rest of his life. As a result, Shahn, who had to take responsibility for supporting the family, was taken out of school and sent to apprentice as a lithographer when he was a young teenager. The loss of a high school education was a big blow to him. Sadly, as the injustices of poverty are often exponential, calamity followed several years later when the youngest child in the family, one of Shahn’s two brothers born in the United States, drowned on Cape Cod. The boy didn’t know how to swim, and Shahn, who had been with him just before the river current carried the boy away, desperately tried to save him but reached the body when it was already submerged at the bottom of the inlet. It’s been said that Shahn never recovered from the tragedy; the best he could do was to wall off the pain, diverting his energies into art.
While mastering the craft of lithography, Shahn became adept at lettering, falling in love, as he once put it, with the relationships, the rhythms and lines of the many alphabets. In an interview after his death, his widow, Bernarda Bryson (Shahn was married twice and had five children all together), talked about the ease with which he made space between all the letters “by eye and intuition.” Lettering was, in fact, the bridge that connected Shahn to his first important artistic breakthrough, the series of gouache portraits inspired by newspaper clippings about France’s infamous Dreyfus affair. As he later remembered, he lettered an explanation under each portrait in his finest lithographic script. With this innovation, something like the technique used by graphic novelists, he saw a way to bring his personal thoughts and feelings into an art that was purposeful, simplified and narrative. This carried over, in 1931-1932, to his most famous project, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, a series of 23 gouache paintings that depict the story of Sacco and Vanzetti from the accusation of their guilt to their deaths. Shahn’s large and boldly designed study for a mural panel based on that project introduces the show at the Jewish Museum.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, 1931–32, gouache on paper on board, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1935, 144.1935. © 2025 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–32, tempera on canvas mounted on composition board, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Edith and Milton Lowenthal in memory of Juliana Force, 49.22. © 2025 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Like the death of George Floyd a century later, the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s ignited protests, not only in America, but in places as far away as Tokyo, Sydney and Buenos Aires. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti mural panel depicts the funeral of the two Italian immigrant anarchists who were executed for a murder they denied having committed, but in the great artistic storytelling tradition, the painting brings aspects from several episodes of their agonizing history colliding together on the picture plane. The members of the committee who reviewed Sacco and Vanzetti’s conviction—two university professors and a retired judge—dominate the space above Sacco and Vanzetti’s coffins and, in the far distance, on what appears to be a poster affixed to the courthouse wall, Shahn has satirically placed a tiny image of the trial’s notorious presiding judge, Webster Thayer, raising a hand as if taking an oath. Shahn’s composition transforms the case, an armed robbery in which the paymaster was shot multiple times, into a passion scene, comparing Sacco and Vanzetti’s suffering to the suffering of Christ, so that you feel the anger and injustice and see it in all the narrative elements—the hollow expressions of remorse on the committee members’ faces, their ostentatious top hats, the luxuriant white lilies held tight in their hands, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell with his brilliant scarlet academic hood, the trappings of his authority (Lowell was one of the two professors on the review committee)—all moderated by the slightly comic but heartbreaking detail of Vanzetti’s famous dark black mustache peeking out from the austere wooden coffin.
When the individual paintings from the series were first shown at the Downtown Gallery, they were a huge success and the work almost completely sold out. But it was an entirely different story for the larger painting—the mural panel commissioned for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 mural exhibition; several of the museum’s trustees were offended by the “Communistic” message and critics unanimously panned the exhibit. This was the first, but not the last, time Shahn would experience the vicissitudes of art-world opinion, and for a man who was simultaneously tough and fragile, the fickle changeability of the public was certainly part of the impetus that led him to valorize nonconformity.
Scott’s Run West Virginia is another of the standouts from the exhibition, painted only a few years after The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti but focusing on the degradation and hopelessness caused by the Great Depression. Using Shahn’s characteristically efficient storytelling technique, melding satire and compassion, the painting was inspired by the 1935 trip to the South the artist made while working as a photographer with the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration. Based on Shahn’s own photographic image, taken with a Leica camera with a right-angle viewfinder, the painting portrays three men at the railroad yard of a coal camp where there hadn’t been reliable work for years. Two of the men wear miners’ soft cloth caps, while we can suspect the third man, dressed in a dusty fedora and a worn-to-the-nub three-piece suit, was once in management. Boxed in by a long line of train cars and tracks on one side and a complex of abandoned ramshackle housing on the other, they’re painted as a group, but, like the figures in a Hopper painting, each exists in deep isolation, while the anonymity of the figures pushes the viewer to ask: Will they leave the coal camp? Where can they go? What’s left of their world? What can be done for their aloneness?
Scotts Run, West Virginia, 1937, tempera on paper mounted on wood, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, 38.11. © 2025 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Shahn’s reputation soared because of the sincerity and the bold self-confidence of his work during the Depression and the war years. The Museum of Modern Art recognized his achievements, giving him a one-man show in 1947 and choosing him and Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning to represent the United States at the 1954 Venice Biennale. But the last decades of his life were hard for Shahn. One has to imagine that he was deeply shaken by the disclosures of the Holocaust and the atrocities in the Kovno area where his family had once lived, but the nature of his art was to eschew personal experience, so we don’t know how he absorbed those revelations. Because of his reputation as a leftist and one-time fellow traveler, he was blacklisted by CBS Broadcasting during the McCarthy era. The FBI interviewed him in 1953 and maintained a file on him for the rest of his life, and in 1959 he was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. During the same period, he was repeatedly criticized, both in the press and at public forums, by art critics and artists for continuing to work figuratively rather than becoming part of the dominant Abstract Expressionist movement. And he defended himself eloquently: “Is there nothing to weep about in this world any more? Is all our pity and anger to be reduced to a few tastefully arranged straight lines or petulant squirts from a tube held over a canvas?” Against all of these pressures, he continued to work on many different projects, but for the most part, the art he made after the war lacks the vitality of that of his early career. As a friend of his put it, “These were the works of a famous man, not a famous artist.”
Integration, Supreme Court, 1963, tempera on paper mounted on masonite, Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Purchased with funds from the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc., 1964.6. © 2025 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
In the last rooms of the show, however, one work stands out for its quiet monumentality. Integration, Supreme Court might not have had the same effect at another time, but today, the painting celebrating the most liberal court’s groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision is astonishing. These were, of course, the justices whose names my generation learned in school, not knowing how consequential or fragile their decision would someday seem: Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Associate Justices Hugo Black, Stanley F. Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Robert H. Jackson, Harold H. Burton, Tom C. Clark and Sherman Minton. Shahn situates the justices toward the bottom of the picture plane so we see them from the perspective of spectators in the gallery, small and far away, and lined up diagonally, as if they were balanced on a fulcrum. Four fantastical Ionic columns break through the crusty palimpsest of azure sky. If you look carefully, you see the simple features and small adornments characterizing each man, ordinary things: straight eyebrows, arched eyebrows, a bowtie, eyeglasses, small protruding ears, one’s square face, another’s widow’s peak. Acknowledging a deep understanding of the celebrated civil rights decision, the face of every justice in that all-male and all-white court has been carefully painted in a different skin tone, since that’s the way we naturally are in a country that is still struggling to perfect the aspirations of its democracy.
Top image: Hans Namuth, Ben Shahn [Roosevelt, New Jersey], 1964, gelatin silver print, 11 x 13 15/16 in. (27.9 x 35.4 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of the Estate of Hans Namuth. © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona