A singular interpreter of 20th-century anxieties that have Proud Boy-ed themselves into the 21st, Shahn was not shy about making art from the more calamitous events endured by him and his contemporaries. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, his family fled the czar’s empire for America after his father was dispatched to a Siberian gulag. After settling in impoverished Williamsburg, Brooklyn — what would he make, one wonders, of the $24 margaritas slung at the hip nabe’s William Vale Hotel today? — Shahn trained as a teen lithographer, studied biology at NYU (the STEM training of its day), and subsequently returned, more convinced than ever, to the critical-symbolic power of art. Formal painting classes followed, then the European tour. Along with thousands of wet-behind-the-ears Americans, he diligently ogled — or better put, rubbernecked — the radical doings of, among other avant-gardists, Matisse, Dufy, Rouault, Picasso, and Klee.
This was in the 1920s, a decade before Europe backslid into what we might today term full accelerationist mode. To paraphrase the British band Steps’ 2020 synth-pop hit “Tell Me What the Future Holds,” Shahn used art — most specifically, picture-making — to face squarely forward while confronting the seismic shocks of a convulsive present. Still to come: the stock market crash of 1929, the Dust Bowl, Jim Crow, the rise of fascism, the bloodletting of WWII and the Holocaust, the Cold War and the resulting muzzling of free speech in both East and West, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the struggle for civil rights, the assassinations of America’s acronymic martyrs — JFK, X, MLK, and RFK — and the rise and fall of independence and anti-colonial movements throughout the world.
In Ezra Pound’s words, “the age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace”; perhaps, in Baudelaire’s phrase, a “Painter of Modern Life.” Shahn’s no-brow synthesis of European and American vanguardism — a mix of realism, muralism, cubism, surrealism, and a knack for using magazine-ready images — delivered powerfully and on both counts. Notably, his art also reached hungry audiences beyond connoisseurs’ drawing rooms and the museum. Where other artists’ contributions remain routinely pegged to their time’s formal developments, Shahn’s encapsulated an era of righteous real-world protest, from the railroading of labor-union innocents like Tom Mooney to the immigrant-baiting of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to the systematic bloodletting of the Vietnam War. Also crucial to Shahn’s success: His temperas, gouaches, drawings, lithographs, and photographs eschewed isms for a vivid style that anticipated the distilled conviction of younger Black artists, such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. Today, 56 years after his death, Shahn remains among the few white American artists of his or our time capable of painting politics with the zeal, particular and universal, of canon-busters Robert Colescott, Faith Ringgold, and Kerry James Marshall.