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Lithuanian born Shahn ventured to Brooklyn with his family as a young child.
As a kid, he nurtured creative sensibilities by illustrating passages from the Old Testament. As a teenager, he worked in a lithography print shop by day and went to night school. And as a grown-up artist, he was as gifted at rendering the whimsical beauty of the everyday as he was at expressing political strife in imagery.
Shahn was never one to fear controversial subject matter. He used illustration to speak out against the injustice of the famed Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial in 1932, and in the '60’s he teamed up with a group of artists, graphic designers and art directors to design anti-H-bomb propaganda. These are just a couple of items on his protest rap sheet.
In 1933, Shahn would assist political kindred spirit Diego Rivera on a mural for New York’s RCA building. Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller and titled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future (whew), the fresco contrasted the societal horrors of fascism with a socialist paradise and featured a likeness of Lenin. Not surprisingly, Rockefeller (the ultimate capitalist) wasn’t super keen on this theme and asked Rivera to tone it down. Though Shahn and his fellow assistants threatened to strike if Rivera acquiesced, the hullabaloo proved to be futile. Not one to tolerate commie nonsense, Rockefeller halted work on the mural and sent the artists home. The unfinished painting was covered by lots of little canvases to hide it from view, and was destroyed for good the next year.
Shahn’s career didn’t limit him to radical political art, though. His talent was discovered by the ad world and he eventually came to create powerful commercial graphics. Don’t call him a sellout--while he himself once dismissed commercial illustration as an easy way to make extra cash, he came to embrace the challenge of articulating abstract ideas for the masses...even if it meant working for The Man. Hey, leftists gotta eat, too!
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.
Born Benjamin Shahn in what was then the Russian Empire, in 1898, he emigrated with his Jewish family to the United States in 1906 following his father’s exile to Siberia for suspected revolutionary activity. Settling in Brooklyn, Shahn initially trained as a lithographer. After briefly studying biology at New York University, he turned fully to art, attending the National Academy of Design and traveling through Europe with his first wife. Though influenced by European modernists, Shahn ultimately rejected their stylistic approaches in favor of a realist mode aligned with his social concerns, a direction crystallized by his 1932 series The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, which responded critically to contemporary politics.
During the Great Depression, Shahn’s work with the Public Works of Art Project, the Resettlement Administration, and the Farm Security Administration further solidified his role as a social-documentary artist. Collaborating with figures such as Diego Rivera and Walker Evans, he produced photographic and mural work addressing labor conditions and American life under the New Deal. His murals for the Jersey Homesteads school, the Bronx Post Office, and the Social Security Administration exemplify themes such as immigrant hardship, labor struggles, and collective reform, often grounding his compositions in visual references to Jewish tradition and American political history.
Later in his career, he contributed to wartime propaganda through the Office of War Information, although his anti-war stance emerged in later paintings like Death on the Beach and Liberation. He produced commercial illustrations for major magazines, created stained glass, and represented the United States at the 1954 Venice Biennale. Consistently rejecting abstraction in favor of legible, symbol-laden realism, Shahn's compositions often featured expressive distortions, asymmetry, and dynamic spatial arrangements. He received honorary doctorates from Princeton University and Harvard University, and joined Harvard as a Charles Eliot Norton professor in 1956.
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