Ben Shahn.

Throughout his life, Ben Shahn paid close attention to the human heart; for those who know his art, the heart beats a little steadier. This book proves that Ben Shahn was a master artist. I have always loved his work, especially his books, with their spirited, hand-lettered pages, but I understood little of his motivation. In this big, beautiful book, Frances K. Pohl, who teaches art history at Pomona College and has written often about Shahn, delineates his history, placing his life in tandem with his personal writings and illustrating it with hundreds of color reproductions of Shahn's works. It makes a generous parcel of ideas, for Shahn was a prolific artist, responding fully to the radical politics and social developments taking place in Twentieth Century America.

Born to a Russian Jewish family in Lithuania in 1898, Shahn grew up in the small town of Vilkomir, forty miles east of the city of Kovno. His childhood in Lithuania instilled in him a love for storytelling and set him on the path to fighting injustice. Social, economic, and political persecution of Jews was widespread, and Shahn's father, Joshua Hessel Shahn, was well in the middle of it as a socialist in active resistance to the Czar. The elder Shahn fled Lithuania for South Africa and then moved on to the United States, where he sent for his family.

Ben was eight years old when he entered the chaotic world of Brooklyn, leaving behind him the closed community and intimate Bible legends of Jewish Lithuania. He entered the ever-swirling melting pot of America, where all life was in a state of transition. New problems, jobs, faces, and ideas from a culture full of strife and opportunity, but not without its own version of racism and discrimination against the Jewish immigrant. This proved fertile ground for Shahn's development as an artist, offering a rich tableau of imagery--run-down buildings, garbage-strewn vacant lots, and the crowded streets exposing the complex textures of family life.

Shahn went to work at age fourteen as an apprentice in his uncle's lithography shop. Here he learned the art of letter-making and developed a strong appreciation of the written word, memorizing Shakespeare, reading the Iliad and the writings of Henry Adams and Tolstoy. Through the exacting discipline of drawing letter forms, he developed a strong appreciation of composition, balance, and proportion. This aesthetic understanding was to influence his art-making throughout his life. He attended night school, graduated from high school, and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, where he started painting. He used his earnings from his trade in lithography to finance further studies in art and philosophy at New York University, the City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design.

In 1924, Shahn traveled to Europe to broaden his knowledge of art through the study of masterpieces and, while in Paris, he was exposed to rebellion against the very forms he so longed to emulate. The scene was alive with the modern art movement, and Shahn's attention was drawn to Picasso, Cezanne, and Matisse. His painting changed to reflect contemporary concerns with abstraction of form and color. His paintings started drawing attention in New York and began to sell. But Shahn was wary of the fashionable New York art world and wanted more from his art than simple abstraction of color forms. He was searching for a voice to communicate his sense of history and to express his outrage at the social injustice he saw around him.

In 1929, Shahn returned to New York, where he befriended, and shared a studio with, the photographer Walker Evans. Through Evans, Shahn came to appreciate the camera's ability to capture the specificity of a subject. Evans's photographs told the story of a people through intimate portraiture and exquisite attention to detail. When sequenced, the pictures revealed a narrative containing the general and the specific qualities of everyday life that so appealed to Shahn. He started taking his own pictures and transferring those details into his painting.

These maturations in Shahn's work coincided with the stock-market crash of 1929. Artists were hit hard by the crash; art sales were at a standstill, and most artists were forced to seek alternative means of supporting themselves. Shahn relied on his training in the lithographic arts for employment, and started producing prints and publishing books using his talent as an illustrator and master letterer.

He was becoming increasingly politicized as he searched for a personal vision--a better way to tell his own story. His attention swung toward the injustices of the day. He began an interest in court trials with political or social implications--most notably the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in which two Italian immigrants were accused of murder. It was a case of justice gone awry--persecuting Nicola Sacco, a shoe-maker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, for their anarchist political beliefs rather than for any crime they had committed.

"I got to thinking about the Sacco-Vanzetti case," Shahn writes. "They'd been electrocuted in 1927, and in Europe of course I'd seen all the demonstrations against the trial--a lot more than there were over here. Ever since I could remember, I'd wished that I'd been lucky enough to be alive at a great time--when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly I realized I was! Here I was living through another crucifixion. Here was something to paint!"

And paint he did, executing numerous series of paintings, drawings, and prints--even murals--telling the story of this gross miscarriage of justice.

Throughout the depression years of the 1930s, Shahn toured the country taking photographs and sketching the details of everyday American life. He was employed by the Farm Security Administration to produce photographic records of areas hard hit by drought or unemployment. He traveled the South and the Middle West, taking approximately 6,000 photographs. He wrote how he had "crossed and recrossed many sections of the country, and had come to know well so many people of all kinds of belief and temperament, which they maintained with a transcendent indifference to their lot in life. Theories had melted before such experience. My own painting then had turned from what is called 'social realism' into a sort of personal realism. I found the qualities of people a constant pleasure." Shahn subsequently focused his attention more on the personal lives of working-class people and less on their public trials.

Shahn began to paint murals in public spaces for the Federal Arts Project. They were frescoes recounting the history of immigrants, expressing themes of community, organized labor, and representative government. Invariably, inspirational texts applied to these works offered hopeful visions of the future.

The written word was an oftenemployed element in Shahn's art. Later in life he wrote, "Looking at the elegance of a page of Khmer script, at the handsome square Sanskrit, or the Arabic, at stones carved with the mysterious runes of the Anglo-Saxons, at early Greek tablets, the cuneiform stelae of the Sumerians, or at the majestic lettering on some Roman monument, who can fail to find there an immediate sense of the hand that made the letters? There is a joy of workmanship that no time or weathering can erase. We may never know who dictated the words written, or under what circumstances they were made. But the skill remains there, the elaboration of shapes and rhythms, the understanding that must reside in the workman and in him alone. Small wonder that so many people have attributed the origins of the alphabets to their gods!"

With the U.S. involvement in World War II, Shahn produced a number of paintings to be printed as posters for the Office of War Information. Only a few of these were actually printed; most were rejected because they were "too violent" or not "appealing enough." The only idea he never had to fight for was titled "KEEP QUIET: THE ENEMY IS LISTENING." He also worked for the graphics division of the Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee. His best known poster was "FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT AFTER THE WAR--REGISTER/VOTE," an idea that was rejected earlier by the Office of War Information because it "didn't mean anything." However, the CIO used it because it called for full employment and a fully integrated work force.

Shahn strove to achieve a universal quality in his art--to render "the private experience which illuminates the personal world in which each of us lives the major part of his life." The paintings do not deal with the gory details and battles of war, but, as Pohl eloquently writes, "They record intimate, surreal moments in the lives of individuals or small groups as they traverse the devastated landscape in search of ways to comprehend the magnitude of the destruction facing them. There is a sense of resignation, yet also of persistence, as they carry on their lives."

Shahn became a strong proponent of what he termed "humanistic art," rejecting the trend after the war for artists to become politically disengaged, producing nonobjective experiments in abstract expressionism. This art was an expression of the individual psyche rather than a manifesto for political causes.

Shahn spoke to this difference in 1952: "Of our fine art there are two main streams, one humanistic, necessarily asking the question, 'To what end?' greatly concerned with the implications of man's way of life; the other, the abstract and nonobjective, absorbed in its own plastic problems, and not involved with the human prospect....

"If either art or society is to survive the coming half-century, it will be necessary for us to reassess our values. The time is past due for us to decide whether we are a moral people, or merely a comfortable people, whether we place our own convenience above the life-struggle of backward nations, whether we place the sanctity of enterprise above the debasement of our public. If it falls to the lot of artists and poets to ask these questions, then the more honorable their role. It is not the survival of art alone that is at issue, but the survival of the free individual and a civilized society."

These concerns for individual freedom and human survival became the dominant theme in Shahn's art. He was appalled by the Holocaust in Europe and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He became an outspoken critic of redbaiting and McCarthyism in the 1950s. With the heating up of the Cold War and increased production of the weapons of mass destruction, Shahn executed drawings and posters to protest H-bomb testing and promote peace.

And during this time, Shahn rediscovered his more spiritual side. His wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, writes, "During the later years of Ben's life there was a certain resurgence of religious imagery in his work. It seemed to me that, since he had rather emphatically cast off his religious ties and traditions during his youth, he could now return to them freely and with a fresh eye, and without the sense of moral burden and entrapment that they had once held for him.... His new involvement was curiously unparochial; he still rejected all personal identification with sect or creed. He deeply appreciated the observances, the ritual and lore of his inherited Judaism, but also was profoundly moved by the sonorous masses of Catholicism and, again, by the tough spirit of early Protestantism."

Shahn's renewed interest in the spiritual needs of humanity brought him once again to the art of mural-making, but now he designed large murals to be executed in mosaic. Shahn stayed clear of specific references to religion in his work, but relied on the symbolism of his imagery to convey his ideas. Of this work Shahn stated that "materialistic advances, technology and science alone, without the guiding influences of learning, of the arts, of philosophy, and of moral and spiritual values, may be a scourge rather than a blessing to mankind."

These basic principles were the guideposts to which Shahn returned again and again. His art, as realized in the publication of this book, is a tribute to humanity in all of its messy glory. His life serves as an example to which all artists may aspire, as Pohl writes: "He was a public figure, an advocate of community action and responsibility, and yet he was also a private individual, struggling with questions about his spiritual and ethnic identity, his position in a rapidly changing art world, and the effectiveness of his own individual political actions."