“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” the new show at the Jewish Museum, is the first retrospective of Shahn’s work in America since 1978. It reportedly had a difficult time finding a U.S. home after it opened, at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, in 2023, and one can see why. The curators seem to have licked a finger and held it to the political winds. As the catalogue states, the exhibition intends to read Shahn’s paintings, posters, drawings, and photographs “through the lens of contemporary diversity and equity perspectives.” There’s no outpouring of new research, no bigger-than-ever assemblage of buried or forgotten work. Instead, the gambit here is to shock-paddle Shahn back to life, as an unsung national hero: a progressive who rallied to the causes of labor, civil rights, and social welfare, and whose art we should appreciate because of his exemplary politics. The mystery that the show never addresses is why people once cared so much about his art—and why we should, today.
Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898, under the fist of Russian rule, and arrived at Ellis Island in 1906, with more than a hundred thousand other Jews from Eastern Europe. He apprenticed as a lithographer, learning to mix acid, sharpen chisels, and prep lithography stones before progressing to letters, drilling himself for months on the roman alphabet. While working on and off, he paid his way through classes at N.Y.U., City College, and the National Academy of Design, and deepened his arts education on trips to Europe and North Africa. His most important influence, though, remained lithography—its limestone and grease pencil—and the engraver’s chisel. These tools molded Shahn as a draftsman and gave him a signature style, even in his paintings. Look at almost any canvas and you can see his rough black line at work, corralling and structuring muddy splotches of paint.
The show offers no glimpse of Shahn’s apprentice years or French-modernist flailing, when he fell under the spell of Cézanne, Matisse, and Rouault, and instead begins with Shahn’s most famous piece: “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” (1931-32). It usually lives downtown, at the Whitney Museum, and here it’s mounted so that it can be seen from the sidewalk on Ninety-second Street, even before you hit the security line. In 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two working-class Italian anarchists charged with murder, were sent to the electric chair in Massachusetts, setting off protests around the world. Shahn puts the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti at the foot of the painting, in their coffins, and above them the three members of the Lowell Committee, who affirmed the guilty verdict. The piece, as the title suggests, is a modern-day Crucifixion.