MARTYRS AND HEROES IN MODERN TIMES.

Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

The Harvard University Art Museums 

Cambridge, Massachusetts 

February 5-April 30, 2000

Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times

by Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman and Jenna Webster

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2000

340 pp./$45.00 (sb)

The Phillips Collection

Washington, D.C.

June 10-August 27, 2000

The Grey Art Gallery

New York University 

New York, New York

November 14, 2000-January 27, 2001

The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

April 19-June 17, 2001

Ben Shahn had a remarkable career as a photographer, painter, graphic artist and activist, whose sharp observations and critical analysis brought enormous insight into the life and politics of his era. However, until the last few years, most studies have relegated Shahn to a minor position in the history of American art. The exhibition Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times and its accompanying catalog focus almost exclusively on a short but formative period of Shahn's career, centered on the street photographs he made in New York City in the early to mid-1930s. The project contributes to new ongoing scholarly study of the long career of this complex political artist. Shahn's New York photographs were central to the development of his aesthetic and at the same time they provided him with a resource of urban images to which he returned again and again for his paintings and graphic artworks.

The curators' decision to focus exclusively on the New York photographs, made before his better-known works as a staff photographer for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) from 1935 to 1938, has several virtues. First, the exhibition publicizes a strength of the major personal archive of Shahn photographs, negatives and contact strips now in the collection (donated in 1970 by Bernarda Bryson Shahn, the photographer's widow) of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. Perhaps more significantly, this close examination of such a brief period in Shahn's career is a window into how urban life and left politics influenced the art of the 1 930s. Members of the artistic and intellectual community in New York City, including Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein, who included Shahn's work in the 1932 exhibition he curated for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), "Murals by American Painters and Photographers," promoted documentary photographs as an art form in their own r ight. Another part of the New York art world in which Shahn played a larger role was the Artists' Union, led by Stuart Davis. Long engaged with radical politics, Shahn had joined the Young People's Socialist League at age 16, and sharpened his political aesthetic while learning fresco painting technique as an assistant to Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center murals in 1933.

The first half of the exhibition "Ben Shahn's New York" is structured according to the different Manhattan neighborhoods--including the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Union Square and Midtown--that the artist observed in his unposed photographs, often taken with a right angle viewfinder in order to capture his subjects unaware. This format of organizing the exhibition through the theme of neighborhoods allows comparison of Shahn's images across time and media. Shahn returned to his New York images over and over, using them as the basis for drawings and paintings in succeeding decades. Displaying work that spans the decades within each section provides insights into the continuity and evolution of Shahn's ideas that would not emerge with a more conventional chronological structure.

Shahn's documentary photography in the early 1930s was distinctive for its sensitive treatment of urban poverty, race relations and Jewish and Italian immigrant cultures. Working neither for the government programs nor corporate publications, Shahn's independent production of documentary was somewhat anomalous for the era. He did, however, publish some of his street photography in left political journals, such as New Theatre and Art Front. Laura Katzman's thoughtful analysis in her first catalog essay, "Ben Shahn's New York: Scenes from the Living Theatre," employs on close study of composition and iconographic analysis of word fragments and signs, and the unplanned narrative resulting from the working method recorded on Shahn's contact strips. Katzman conveys Shahn's approach to his subjects by studying three or four consecutive images on 35 millimeter contact prints. Shahn wandered around New York City with specific themes in mind, such as homeless men lying on street grates, photographing subjects who wer e likely unaware that they were being photographed. Katzman argues for the social significance of the images as both witnesses to urban poverty and agents for change. She questions the now familiar concept of documentary photography as "double subjugation," that is, the person--already oppressed by poverty--becomes spectacle for subsequent viewers. Rather, Katzman believes that "Shahn's photographs of New York's underclass defy such reductive categorization; his subjects are neither victimized nor sanitized."

Deborah Martin Kao's essay, "Ben Shahn and the Public Use of Art," turns to Shahn's overtly political imagery, particularly four themes that he explored extensively in the early 1930s. The first theme, the case of Tom Mooney, a labor leader who was widely believed to have been unjustly imprisoned for the deaths of 10 people during a demonstration in San Francisco, was still a live issue in the American labor movement even though Mooney had been convicted in 1916. Other political rallying points that inspired Shahn were the Scottsboro Boys case, in which nine black men were falsely convicted on charges that they had raped two white women, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which two Italian-American labor organizers were believed framed and unjustly executed for the robbery and murder of a paymaster and guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Shahn based his mural studies (shown at the Museum of Modern Art, over protests, in 1932) and his most famous painting (The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1932) on new spaper clippings and his own participation in protests over this case.

One of the major political art projects that Shahn tackled in the early 1930s was the design for an enormous mural proposed for the Ryker's Island penitentiary, and one of the highlights of the exhibition and catalog is the computer generated model, based on the artist's studies, of what the completed project would have looked like on site. The content of the mural correlated with Shahn's intense political beliefs. As Kao explains, "From Shahn's perspective the American prison population included martyrs and heroes of the revolutionary labor movement, as well as political agitators, the unemployed, and victims of racial and class discrimination." The mural was an ambitious undertaking. Shahn and his collaborator Lou Block campaigned prison officials for permission to paint the walls, and secured New York State funds to pay for it. In preparation, they photographed on the streets of the Lower East Side and Shahn photographed the inmates of the decaying correctional institute on Blackwell's Island and the more modern facilities on Ryker's Island. His sympathetic portraits and architectural studies provided ideas for the large work intended to cover both sides of a 100-foot corridor as well as the prison chapels. Shahn's iconographic scheme criticized older penal models of punishment and abuse, and promoted newer practices of teaching inmates trades and engaging them in productive labor. Despite its emphasis on rehabilitation and productivity, Shahn worried that its content might be censored because the mural strongly made the point that unemployment turned men into inmates and he left open the issue of whether prison rehabilitation is always successful. After two years of preparation, the project was "disapproved" by the Municipal Art Commission as "psychologically unfit." Within the art community, however, the mural was considered a model for public art and protests against its rejection followed, though they were unable to overturn the decision.

Kao's essay provides a nuanced reading of Shahn's political motivations and his evolving political affiliations in the light of his artmaking. Shahn's production in multiple media was at the core of his socially engaged artwork during this period. Shahn was a maker of photographs, murals and easel paintings. He assembled clipping files of images from newspapers and magazines; and he edited his own still camera negatives, selecting some images and printing and mounting them for display while reserving others for future information and inspiration in his files. He was also impressed by the potentials for social engagement promised by contemporary film.

The "master medium" of Jenna Webster's essay, "Ben Shahn and the Master Medium," is Shahn's term for film. This essay recounts the wide-ranging influence of film on Shahn's art and his understanding of contemporary life. Shahn used newsreels and popular films as well as photographs as sources for his paintings, but his interest in film also reflects the medium's contemporary cultural significance as "a public art" (as art historian Meyer Schapiro characterized film in a 1936 article in the periodical Art Front) [1] among artists, intellectuals and political activists. New York City was an especially vibrant center: the heart of independent filmmaking in America at that time, a city where Shahn viewed films at MoMA, the Workers Film and Photo League and at popular movies houses. Shahn photographed movie house exteriors as part of his study of the city's streets and culture, and explored the subject further in his photography for the RA in 1935. Webster's contextual readings of Shahn's pictures of people, part icularly children, interacting with the film stills and posters of stars ornamenting movie theater marquees and street-level advertising are especially rewarding. She describes Shahn's recognition of the attractions of Hollywood movies and his production of alternatives to their images of workers and poor people in his photographs and paintings.

Katzman describes the often contradictory status of Shahn's work in photography: the camera as aide-memoire, but also as a vital tool for gathering information about his urban subjects--irreverent about technique, but also printing, mounting and signing selected photographs. A key work for her account of Shahn's understanding of himself as a photographer and painter in the 1930s is his painting Photographer's Window (1939-40), based upon a Shahn photograph of a Lower East Side studio portrait photographer's window. Katzman carefully plots Shahn's painted alternations of his photographic source--including substitution of figures from his RA/FSA photographs into the studio por traits, his elision and alternation of the subjects of the commercial portraits and his use of color--as Shahn's metacommentary on his ideas about painting and photography at that date. The window, filled with framed studio portraits of local residents, served Shahn as a figure for photographic representation, with its differences between commercial and documentary photography and his own conflicts between promoting and questioning the documentary modes of RA/FSA images. It is a fascinating reading of the work, attentive to the specificity of photographic activities of the period, to the interconnection between photography and painting in Shahn's art and to the degree to which Shahn's social and political outlook informed his approach to all of these concerns in the 1930s.

In the final section of the essay Webster describes Shahn's 1936 collaboration with Walker Evans on the production of a half-hour, 35 millimeter film for the RA's Documentary Film Unit. Titled We Are the People, the film was part of the RA's promotion of suburban resettlement communities as an alternative to overcrowded urban conditions. The film was set in the resettlement community of Greenbelt, Maryland, but was soon cancelled by the RA and none of the film footage survives. Webster's discussion of the project, based upon archives at the Fogg and other institutions, reconstructs details of its production and explores Shahn's use of themes from We Are the People in his subsequent New Deal mural projects. Webster's concluding remarks summarize her essay's contribution to the outlook of this exhibition: while Shahn's involvement with film and film culture was limited, relative to his entire artistic production, his integration of film's iconography and techniques spoke to his profound enthusiasm for a medium that, in his estimation, engaged his audience completely.

"The Politics of Media: Painting and Photography in the Art of Ben Shahn," Katzman's second essay in the catalog, contributes a thorough analysis of the vexing and shifting relationship between Shahn's identities as a painter and a photographer. As Katzman explains, Shahn used photography in complex ways that neither he nor scholars of his work have acknowledged. Katzman weighs the influence of post-World War II politics on art critical responses to Shahn's use of photographs as sources for his paintings, beginning her discussion with an account of how this issue affected the organization and reception of Shahn's 1947 MoMA exhibition. While long-standing criticisms of painters who derived their work from photographic sources were a factor, Katzman also attributes the mixed response to Shahn's work to the social and political meanings that were attached to RA/FSA work in the more politically conservative period of the late '40s through early '50s. However, the essay's primary focus is on the relation between photography and painting for Shahn in the 1930s. Katzman argues for a link between photography and left politics in Shahn's work, whether the photographs were Shahn's own street photographs of urban and rural working-class people, or the extensive archive of newspaper and magazine clippings that he assembled and studied for his paintings.

The catalog for Ben Shahn's New York also includes a selection of contemporary documents comprised of reviews, interviews and commentary by major artists and critics of the period including Davis, Evans, Rivera, Jean Charlot, Clement Greenberg and Nancy Newhall. The essays and documents are extensively illustrated with color and black and white reproductions of paintings, photographs, sketches and such contextual material as magazine page spreads and newspaper articles. The result is an exhibition catalog that can be widely consulted by historians of the art, photography and visual culture of the period.

A Web site with an extensive database on the Shahn archive at the Fogg was produced in conjunction with the exhibition. The catalog, the exhibition and its national tour and the Web site together are a model for the circulation of a photographer's archive.

Ben Shahn's New York focuses on only a few years of Shahn's work: while this focus may seem limited, it is more than justified by Shahn's complex interest in visual culture of the period. The publication's thorough historical account of Shahn's photography is a corrective to previous viewings of Shahn as primarily a painter, or as a photographer who worked for the RA/FSA, or as a painter who took photographs that he occasionally used as studies for paintings. Built upon an exemplary analysis of the artist's archives, Ben Shahn's New York decisively revises these earlier views for the study of Shahn's art and the work of his peers in New York City in the 1930s.

PATRICIA JOHNSTON is Professor of Art History at Salem State College and a fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. JOANNE LUKITSH is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at the Massachusetts College of Art where she teaches the history of photography and contemporary art.

NOTES

(1.) Meyer Schapiro, "Public Use of Art," in Art Front 2 (November 1936), p.4, quoted in Ben Shahn's New York, p. 78.