Ben Shahn American, 1898-1969

Ben Shahn (1898–1969) was one of the great American social realists, a painter, muralist, and printmaker whose photographs stand among the strongest work produced for the Farm Security Administration. He photographed for three years and used the resulting images as raw material for his painting; the photographs themselves remained little known until Harvard mounted the first exhibition devoted to them in 1969.

Born in Kovno, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, Shahn was five when his father was exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity. The family followed him to New York in 1906 and settled in Williamsburg. Shahn left school at fourteen to apprentice as a lithographer and earned his living in the trade into the 1930s. He assisted Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center mural in 1933. The twenty-three gouaches of The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in 1932, established his reputation: the trial and execution of two Italian anarchists rendered as a sequence, an art that engaged directly with its own time rather than imitating the European masters.

Shahn shared a Manhattan studio with Walker Evans, who taught him photography and recommended him to Roy Stryker in 1935. He worked with a small Leica fitted with a right-angle viewfinder, which allowed him to face one direction while the lens pointed another, and to photograph people who were unaware they were being photographed. He called the camera a “mechanical sketchpad” and insisted that the results were not simply photographs but raw material for painting. At least two of his paintings depict him holding the Leica.

Shahn traveled through the South and Midwest for the Resettlement Administration and then the FSA between 1935 and 1938, working later in the small towns of agricultural Ohio, where concentrating on a single region allowed him to look beneath the surface of rural poverty. “Off I went,” he recalled later, “and boy, that shook me up; I found realities there that I had no idea about.” “He paints two things,” Shahn said of himself, “what I love and what I abhor.” He continued to draw on his own negatives and the wider FSA archive for the rest of his life; his 1935 photograph Sam Nichols, Tenant Farmer became the figure behind barbed wire in the painting 1943 AD.

The Office of War Information recruited Shahn in 1942, although only two of the many posters he designed were ultimately published. He painted murals for Jersey Homesteads and the Bronx Central Annex Post Office, and in 1948 Look named him one of the ten best artists in the world. “If we are to have values, a spiritual life and a culture,” he wrote, “these things must find the imagery and interpretations through the arts.” His Harvard lectures were published as The Shape of Content in 1957.

Shahn died in New York in 1969, the year the Fogg Art Museum presented Ben Shahn as Photographer, the first major exhibition devoted to this aspect of his work. His papers are held by the Archives of American Art, and his FSA negatives by the Library of Congress.