Subject to scores of stately and sanitized images of Martin Luther King Jr. depicted as a paragon of nonviolence and a preacher of racial harmony, we’re not used to seeing him as he often really was: angry. But Ben Shahn’s ink portrait, originally commissioned by Time magazine for the cover of a 1965 issue, is different. Shahn sketches his subject with simple lines and the dimensions of a classical bust. But here, King is hardly placid or peaceful. Instead, he appears mid-speech, head cocked back and mouth wide open; his eyes blaze, his brows furrow, his nostrils flare; you can practically feel the force of his jaw. Shahn—a white Jewish immigrant, the child of socialists who left Russian Lithuania for Brooklyn in the early 1900s—gives us not a meek saint but a fire-breathing prophet, outraged at white America for its complacent acceptance of racial inequality.
Born in 1898, Shahn died just one year after King’s assassination in 1968. The portrait remained one of Shahn’s favorite works, not only an icon of social justice but a testament to the power of words themselves. Shahn had it reproduced as an engraving, stamping below his subject’s face a quote from the famous “Mountaintop” speech, given in Memphis the night before King’s death: “I may not get there with you…but we as a people will get to the promised land.” Shahn also included a small red engraving of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, an homage to the Zohar, a work of medieval Jewish mysticism in which God creates the world through the sacred power of letters. In one portrait, then, we find the twin impulses that—at least as the new retrospective at New York City’s Jewish Museum, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, tries to argue—guided Shahn’s own life and art: his passion for justice, especially for workers and the downtrodden, and his Jewish faith, held with a healthy measure of doubt.
Growing up in an Orthodox community in New York City—nostalgically depicted in New York (1947), an oneiric painting of a shirtless child lying in a city street as a prepared fish floats toward a merchant’s scale above—Shahn bristled at what he considered the oppressive strictures of religion. He was far more comfortable as a worker and an artist, training during his teenage years as a lithographer and typesetter in a Manhattan shop before enrolling at the Art Students League in 1916-17. In his twenties, Shahn traveled to study art in Europe and on his return underwent a full-blown conversion to the cause of the working class. In Italy, he had admired murals by Giotto and the Lorenzetti brothers, while in France he was struck by the popular frenzy over the Dreyfus affair. His paintings of the American cause célèbre of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti proved the catalyst for Shahn’s breakthrough, launching a career that saw him celebrated by Diego Rivera and honored with a Norton professorship at Harvard.
Today, it can be difficult to grasp why the case of Sacco and Vanzetti aroused such passions, sending millions of protestors into the streets and inspiring ambitious young artists like Shahn. In 1920, two men were shot and killed during a botched payroll heist outside a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti—anarchists and Italian immigrants—were apprehended nearby, armed and carrying anarchist pamphlets. They were tried and convicted in 1921. Years of appeals followed, and there was even a special legal review ordered by the Massachusetts governor. Most observers, including the editors of Commonweal, thought they were innocent, their conviction tainted by questionable witnesses, weak evidence, and prejudicial remarks by the trial judge. In 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair.
Painted more than five years after their deaths, Shahn’s Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32) is bitterly direct. Two open caskets, revealing the wan yet serene faces of their occupants, stretch across the lower foreground. Above them are three stiff men—the judges and academics who signed off on the execution—staring blankly into space. Two are on the sides, wearing black suits and shiny top hats and holding a pair of drooping white lilies, symbols of their withered innocence; the other, white-haired and sallow-cheeked, is practically swallowed by his gown and mortarboard. Shahn echoes their deadly seriousness in the gravity of the courthouse architecture behind them. Its heavy columns and fasces-shaped lamppost, along with the black bars delimiting the steps, hint that the real prisoners here are the prideful leaders of our flawed academic and legal institutions.
The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti and other works like it—Shahn also devoted a series to the imprisoned California labor leader Tom Mooney, unjustly convicted of a 1916 San Francisco bombing—were interpreted by audiences and critics as examples of “social realism.” The term is useful to an extent; during the 1930s, Shahn was indeed focused on depicting the social and economic life of the country as it was, not as it ought to be. But it also tends to obscure the deep humanism on display, for instance, in Shahn’s murals. A sketch from his epic portrayal of Jewish-American life for a community center in New Jersey (c. 1936) shows a group of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; their faces are joyless yet determined as they ponder their pasts, not only the violent pogroms but also the peaceful scenes of prayer behind them. Another sketch, made for The Meaning of Social Security (1940-42) in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building in Washington D.C., gives us not just carpenters gingerly framing new housing or a farmer relaxing beside a grain elevator; there’s also a man carrying a rucksack, traversing a set of train tracks with his shoeless son toward an idle factory, while four unemployed workers, two with arms crossed and two with their hands in their pockets, look on.
Shahn benefited immensely from FDR’s New Deal, making ample use of the new positions and funding available for working artists. Besides his mural commissions, Shahn also traveled the country taking photographs and creating posters for the Resettlement Administration. His images of the crowded, poorer districts in New York City and rural Appalachia aren’t exactly hopeful or uplifting. Nor are they uniformly bleak—Shahn frequently finds subtle ways of subverting the conditions of material deprivation he documents. Thus Jewish children on the Lower East Side play in the streets, while shopkeepers pause before rows of fish and meat in store windows etched with Yiddish and English. Shahn’s photos of rural Arkansas, with their ramshackle cabins, emaciated mothers, and dirt-caked children, are starker. Yet there’s dignity here, too, especially in Shahn’s portraits of Black sharecroppers, who seem to smirk at the camera before heading out to the cotton fields.
Images like these often found their way into Shahn’s posters, whether for various agencies like the Resettlement Administration in the mid-1930s, the Office of War Information in the 1940s, or for labor unions like the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. In the 1950s, they were also published in magazines like The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Fortune, whose January 1951 issue features on its cover a serene, overall-wearing bricklayer drawn by Shahn. Shahn would always modify the images seen in the original photographs—whether taken by him or others—blending scenes and changing details to achieve more harmonious and affecting compositions.
The haunting World War II–era Italian Landscape (1943–44) is a case in point. It shows two black-clad widows and a young mother holding a child; the figures are based on photographs of refugees in Franco-era Spain. They all stand in a bombed-out square as a funeral procession passes under a Roman aqueduct in the background. Rubble strewn from another ruined arch on the left draws our attention to their veils, which have roughly the same pointed shape as the arches, underscoring the devastation wrought by the allies in the Italian South as they fought their way north. Yet the unusual stiffness of the veils also signals the hardiness of the civilian population, whose ancient traditions and rituals will outlast the violence inflicted on them by forces they do not control.
There’s an echo of that interest in survival in the more explicitly Jewish works Shahn completed during the last decade of his life. These are mostly abstract, shifting combinations of forms and colors and lines that serve as glosses on quotes from different books of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Job. In one, Where Wast Thou? (1964), God’s response to Job’s lament appears in gilded Hebrew at the bottom of the image. Above it appears the outline of a hand immersed in flames, which gives way at the top to a set of gold constellations laid over differently shaded squares of purple and blue. The cool, soothing tones seem almost to answer the suffering and injustice that Shahn devoted his life to representing.
I’m not sure whether the show, which is on display at the Jewish Museum through October, really demonstrates that Shahn’s art, so directly devoted to addressing the social ills of the twentieth century, is closely linked to his Judaism, since whatever Jewish spirituality he may have had seems largely absent from all but his latest works. But maybe that’s how Shahn saw himself at the end, and the way he may have wished for us to remember him.
Flowering Brushes (1968), one of the final works on view and one of the last before his death, is both a self-portrait and a kind of artistic manifesto. It shows a single figure, sketched in black and white, from the waist up; the subject’s arms are crossed as he brushes his lower lip with his left thumb. In his right hand lies a colorful bouquet of paintbrushes. Above him is another quote in Hebrew, this time from Hillel the Elder in the Mishnah: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I care only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” The same stamp of red Hebrew letters used in Shahn’s portrait of Martin Luther King appears above the artist’s signature at the bottom right.
Shahn used versions of that portrait before: for instance, in 1943 AD, painted the same year, in which the man stands behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp as prisoners toil in the bleak background. We find a similar image of the same man—Shahn took the original photograph, Sam Nichols, tenant farmer, Boone County, Arkansas, in 1935—in a 1946 poster for the Congress of Industrial Organizations that warned of inflation and depression.
Flowering Brushes represents the extraordinary promise of Shahn’s unique brand of social realism, which doesn’t just document problems, “call attention” to the plight of the working class, or celebrate abstract ideologies and progressive policies in a propagandistic way. Instead, Shahn praises the power of looking and making, of seeing and doing. Yes, the poor tenant farmer he’d photographed three decades prior is, in some real sense, him—and he’s for him, as Hillel enjoins. And yet, Shahn is also himself, for himself, and that means being an artist, a creator, like God, endowed not just with vision, but the capacity to make that social vision real.
