What makes a prophet? Whether or not or not we imagine that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had a direct line to God, many have a tendency to consider them as particular person folks with radical and revolutionary concepts, standing proud and alone amid the decadence and conformity round them. However in response to theologian Walter Brueggemann, the prophets didn’t work alone. They had been merely the mouthpieces for the communities during which they lived, labored, cried, celebrated, and arranged. Whether or not in religious texts or on the frontline of protests for human rights at the moment, it isn’t from lone geniuses, however from “prophetic communities” that we have now obtained the concepts which have shattered and reshaped the world.
I think about that the curators of Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, at present on view on the Jewish Museum, would agree with me that this legendary leftist Jewish artist was a prophetic determine. However we’d possible disagree about what which means. This uncommon exhibition succeeds in exhibiting Shahn’s breadth and flexibility, each when it comes to his alternative of medium and the large vary of topics he took on. However regardless of acknowledging his a long time of labor as a part of organized teams preventing for his or her imaginative and prescient of a racially and economically simply world, the exhibit frames Shahn as a lone crusader towards oppression — admirable however typically unobtrusive. He’s made digestible, predictable, secure.
It might not look that manner at first. The present begins along with his portray titled “The Ardour of Sacco and Vanzetti” (1931–32) set towards a blood-red wall. Three judges gaze down on the coffins containing the graying our bodies of the 2 well-known Italian anarchists, possible falsely accused of homicide. Their faces are smug, mildly irritated, even bored. Directly life like and barely distorted, Shahn’s thick, wavering traces retain his trademark scratchy texture and vibrant hues. Subsequent to the portray is the quote from Shahn that provides the present’s title:
Nonconformity is the essential pre-condition of artwork, as it’s the primary pre-condition of excellent considering and due to this fact of progress and greatness in a folks. The diploma of nonconformity current — and tolerated — in a society could be regarded upon as a symptom of its state of well being.
The rooms that observe show a pleasant pattern of Shahn’s work: posters he created whereas directing the Graphic Arts Division on the newly shaped Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and collaborating within the antifascist efforts of the Workplace of Battle Data (OWI); images he took for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Safety Administration (RA/FSA) exhibiting the plight and power of American farmers in the course of the Mud Bowl; and political cartoons for the Progressive Social gathering poking enjoyable at politicians. These are offered alongside a formidable swath of his work, from surreal dreamscapes memorializing the horrors of the Holocaust to flame-engulfed monsters that increase alarm concerning the risks of nuclear warfare to bittersweet reflections on the fantastic thing about on a regular basis life. The ultimate gallery reveals his late-in-life foray into Hebrew lettering, together with illustrations of basic Jewish texts, which without delay provide tender consolation to their viewers and invoke the cosmic eternity of God’s energy.
However we get barely a glimmer of considered one of Shahn’s most resplendent eras: the New Deal murals. The exhibit consists of only one small portray, a examine for a mural entitled “The Nice State of Wisconsin,” with no context, or rationalization that the mural proposal was rejected (it’s unclear why).
Solely within the catalog will we be taught that the artist labored alongside Diego Rivera, who stated Shahn’s works “possess the required qualities, accessibility, and energy to make them essential to the proletariat.” Particularly, Shahn labored in 1933 on Rivera’s “ill-fated” Rockefeller Middle mural “Man at a Crossroads,” destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller when he came upon it contained a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. However the catalog couches even this explicitly Marxist second as simply one other step in Shahn’s profession, describing him studying “composition and fresco method” and witnessing the “breakdown of the skilled working relationship between artists and patrons of opposing political ideologies.” It reads extra like a resume than a historic second in company America’s appeasement of fascist forces within the yr Hitler got here to energy.
A examine for Shahn’s “The Which means of Social Safety” reveals a single farmer, leaning on his equipment throughout a brief break from his work. It’s a lovely portray — the person, content material with the fruits of his labor, smiles subtly, framed by the mushy leaves of an orange tree. However by singling out this examine, the present successfully separates this man from his neighborhood. Right here, the farmer is valued not for his solidarity along with his fellow employees, however just for what he can produce alone.
Time and again on this exhibition, in ways in which usually appear opposite to Shahn’s obvious intent, the person is privileged over the neighborhood. Gone are the receding crowds of immigrants and the lengthy traces of employees that exude a way of energy. In giving these masterworks solely a quick point out, we not solely lose a way of Shahn’s growth as an artist, from the graceful contours of a New Deal muralist to the coarse fields of colour, sharp angles, and wily humor that defines his work, however we additionally lose a way of the custom out of which he grew. Shahn seems to be pigeonholed right into a sort of socially acceptable Chilly Battle liberalism. (The catalog even implies that considered one of his work supported the brand new Israeli state, when he stated nothing of the type. He hardly ever commented on Israel’s existence, a strong assertion in its personal proper.) Like the topics of his paintings, Shahn, too, will get faraway from his communal and organizational context. He’s merely a “nonconformist.”
Offered this fashion, it’s obscure Shahn’s rise and fall. Although usually forgotten at the moment, he was one of the crucial sought-after artists of the mid-Twentieth century. He illustrated for CBS, Time, Fortune, and Harper’s, had solo reveals on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, and even represented the USA within the Venice Biennale. His fall from grace, left largely a thriller on this exhibit, is defined by critic Ariella Budick within the Monetary Instances: the FBI “positioned him underneath surveillance, CBS added his title to a blacklist, and, in 1959, he was summoned to testify earlier than the Home Un-American Actions Committee.” Receiving a “chilly remedy” from “collectors and ideologues” who most well-liked outwardly apolitical Summary Expressionism, he “grew to become more and more marginalised, his gradual fade-out solely briefly interrupted by the raft of obituaries and posthumous reward that appeared on his dying in 1969.”
The catalog bafflingly claims that “Shahn’s figurative realism and social content material served as a logo of U.S. freedom within the early Chilly Battle—as a lot as summary artwork did,” when the reality was that Summary Expressionism was actively promoted by the rich and highly effective, together with the CIA, to stamp out political artwork like Shahn’s. The artist himself minced no phrases: “If Social Realism seeks to impress upon artwork a inflexible aesthetic of subject material and perspective, there additionally exists one other reverse camp which seeks with equal rigidity to exile from artwork all that means—to maintain it free from any content material in any way. That’s the camp of Pedantism.”
Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity affords these with out prior data of leftist Jewish artwork a uncommon present: a large-scale retrospective of one of many best suppressed artists of the Twentieth century. However they may depart the Jewish Museum with an incomplete and skewed understanding of his legacy. They could assume that he was a singular determine with a unique perspective, moderately than a very gifted luminary inside a wealthy and persevering with line of fellow Jewish political artists, from the well-known, like El Lissitsky, to the little mentioned, like Selma Freeman. Many of those artists had been influenced by Jewish folks tales and aesthetics (the likes of which had been practiced by Shahn’s personal anti-Czarist and woodcarving father), which translated splendidly into political cartoons, posters, and murals that referred to as for justice for working folks around the globe. It’s to this prophetic neighborhood, transcending time and nationwide boundaries, that Ben Shahn correctly belongs. If we’re to be taught from his work — as nicely we should always — we should perceive that “nonconformity” will not be, and can’t be, a solo enterprise.
Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity continues on the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) via October 12. The exhibition was organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and tailored by the Jewish Museum, and curated by Laura Katzman in collaboration with Stephen Brown.
