The Brooklyn Rail

At the time of the Great Depression, and then during the Second World War and the Cold War, Ben Shahn (1898-1969) provided reliable critical political commentary on American life. He championed the struggling poor, farmers, labor union members, and oppressed racial minorities. He really was a famous journalist. Every American leftist of a certain age knows his illustrations. I was surprised to learn that Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, on view at the Jewish Museum and organized in collaboration with the Reina Sofía, Madrid, is Shahn’s first US retrospective in almost half a century. With 175 artworks and artifacts from the 1930s to the 1960s, and a full catalogue, it offers an invaluable political perspective on his career. The show brings together his classic The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-32); Father Coughlin (1939), which reveals his skill at caricature; his great World War II posters such as We French Workers Warn You… Defeat Means Slavery, Starvation, Death (1942); and his studies for murals. Many of his photographs of street life were sources for his art. Handball (1939) shows how good as straight artworks these photographs could be. And This is Nazi Brutality (1942) shows that he could be visually imaginative. This exhibition includes his magnificent works dealing with 1960s politics and the Civil Rights struggle: I especially admire his poster Stop H Bomb Tests (1960) and the various portraits of Martin Luther King. And we see late images exploring his Jewish heritage, which present his masterful calligraphy. He was astonishingly productive to the end.

Shahn was a lifelong and vigorous participant in progressive American political life. His art was barely touched by the concerns of such contemporary movements as Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, or Pop art. When, in 1954, Willem de Kooning and Shahn were both given awards at Venice, Clement Greenberg opined that de Kooning’s display “put to shame” the presentation of Shahn, I fear that he really misunderstood the latter. Effective political work in de Kooning’s mature style is as unimaginable as is an abstraction by Shahn, whose figurative style was perfectly suited to his subjects. In that way, Shahn was spiritually akin to Honoré Daumier, whose political prints had little to do with the world of his Impressionist contemporaries.

For a long time, well into the 1980s, this opposition between advanced art and politically critical art was important in America. Shahn was marginalized—no wonder that he didn’t have a show. Now, of course, since the end of modernism has opened up a place for figurative political art, in large part thanks to Black artists, that situation has changed completely. And so, nothing could be timelier, as the catalogue notes, than this Ben Shahn exhibition. He deserves to be seen alongside the political artists I identify as his peers: Käthe Kollwitz, Alice Neel, Peter Saul, Kerry James Marshall, and Sue Coe. The world he presented has changed, in ways that are most challenging. Since Shahn never got to Israel, I wonder what he would say about our present political situation.