Ben Shahn at the GMOA

I wrote about Cy Twombly and his new work at the Louvre. As of late, I’ve been very interested in Black Mountain College and the artists this institution that thrived in the 1950s produced, and it turns out Twombly participated in the program when it was rife with brilliant minds, including Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Twombly’s break from the Minimalist, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionist wave during the ‘50s and ‘60s is quite impressive and adds a touch of independence and distinctiveness to his pieces. The same strand of artistic sovereignty resonates in the work of his fellow Black Mountain College schoolmate and art pioneer Ben Shahn. I’m interested in Shahn because, first, like Twombly, he broke away from the dominant art movements of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Second, the museum owns four of his works, all overflowing with social and political implications.

Ben Shahn was born in Kovos, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, and with his mother and two siblings immigrated to the United States after his father was implicated in a scandal and exiled to Siberia. Shahn was not drawn to the the minimalist, Pop and Abstract Expressionist themes in modern art but instead became enraptured with socio-political issues and could not help but infuse his passion into his work. His paintings, drawings and prints are examples of social realism, a strand of art that depicts brutally honest subjects with the intent of unraveling social and economic injustices and truths. Social realism was especially widespread during the Great Depression, when artists like Dorothea Lange and Walt Kuhn documented the horrors of a penniless government and peoples—dirty children crying, mothers gripping their desperate children, hunger-stricken beggars, etc. Shahn won the attention of Diego Rivera in 1932, who asked him to assist in a mural in Rockefeller Center in New York City (which elicited great controversy for its depiction of Vladimir Lenin). Americans were outraged at the communist messages in the mural, and it was quickly destroyed. The government also asked Shahn to participate in making art for the New Deal, and he accompanied Lange and other photographers to document southern life during the Depression. We are incredibly lucky to have works by Shahn, and even more so to have works that illustrate such powerful scenes and events.

One work of Shahn’s the museum owns is a print of his portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., which Time magazine published on its cover in 1965.

Below, Shahn's "Sunday Morning", part of our collection

"The Clinic" , also part of our collection