Contributed by Margaret McCann / Ben Shahn’s lifelong advocacy against poverty, racism, and fascism is showcased in his solo exhibition “Ben Shahn and Nonconformity,” now up at the Jewish Museum. With engaging documentation, an array of global topics are addressed in printmaking, photography, commercial art, and calligraphy – and some excellent paintings. In the World War II-themed Liberation, children swing around a makeshift maypole before bombed-out ruins. Its delicate, careful execution recalls Paul Klee. Parts link uncertainly in the shallow space of a Cubist matrix, despite the inference of rotational regularity. The brittle gestalt holds together hesitantly, momentary joy contingent on the chance that things can fall apart at any moment.
The Depression era Jersey Homesteads, a study for a mural executed under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, conveys immigrant hopefulness. Bold visual drama, like that of social realists David Siqueiros or Renato Guttuso, undergirds dramatic perspective. Bodies in caskets upper left became Sacco and Vanzetti in the final fresco (at Roosevelt Public School in NJ). Tried for robbery and murder with flimsy evidence and a xenophobic judge, the pair were essentially condemned for being Italian immigrants and anarchists. Their inclusion suggests that even in a free society vigilance must be maintained. Like many immigrants, Shahn’s idealism was tempered by realism, his resilience honed by wider experience of the world. Born in 1898, his Yiddish speaking, Orthodox family left the economic constraints and periodic pogroms Jews endured in Russian Lithuania; his father, confined in Siberia for anti-tsarist activities, later joined them in Williamsburg. After professional lithography training, Shahn studied art at CUNY and the National Academy of Design. He learned the fresco technique assisting Diego Rivera on his 1933 Rockefeller Center mural, tragically destroyed because Rivera refused to remove the image of Vladimir Lenin – a cautionary tale of the anti-communist undertow of American political culture.
A prime example of “man’s inhumanity to man,” the Holocaust is documented in AD 1943. The painting was designed, but never used, as a U.S. Office of War Information propaganda poster, perhaps deemed too dour. Figurative simplifications show the influence of Piero della Francesca on social realists, including Philip Guston, and the stylistic sway of Picasso and Matisse. Its tonal pessimism recalls the social realism of Alice Neel, and Neue Sachlichkeit artists like Otto Dix; Felix Nussbaum, who depicted life in a Nazi concentration camp between his escape and recapture, comes particularly to mind. The viewer confronts a circumspect prisoner whose thousand-yard stare extends far beyond us. The haunting visage, from his photo of an Arkansas tenant farmer (utilized for several artworks), might partly reflect Shahn knowing he’d likely have shared a similar fate had his family not emigrated.
Another Shahn photo, taken working as a photographer in the New Deal Resettlement Administration, inspired Striking Miners, Scotts Run, West Virginia. Earthy realism evokes Gustave Courbet, and Picasso’s Blue Period mood. Space advances in perspective from buildings on the right, flows into the curving axis of the man in brown, moves through overlapping, turning bodies, then upward via the profiled man to join the train’s journey – both into the unknown and back to the homely row houses. Signage and graphic facial details punctuate a smaller arc through the men, echoing the persistent insecurity of the image’s form and content.
Handball is another great composition from a Shahn photo. City life’s gritty details are marginally sequestered, framing the pure, minimalist court. Players contest the blank yet richly painted gouache wall like painters confronting a huge canvas, or viewers at a museum. Ironic overtones implicate Giorgio De Chirico’s sympathetic meditations on meaning and its absence. Gesture conveys empathy and aliveness. Even stylized and from behind, Shahn’s figures exude individual agency.
Contemporary American Sculpture espouses non-conformity; Shahn’s activist paintings (one featuring his tenant farmer) encounter politically neutral sculptures. Shahn’s humanism and Willem de Kooning‘s rarefied aesthetics both represented the United States in the 1954 Venice Biennale, though American art increasingly abandoned figuration during the Cold War, fueled by Clement Greenberg’s belief that abstraction could save painting from representation’s decline into consumerist kitsch. Following Socialist Realist totalitarianism and Nazi Aryan figuration, Abstract Expressionism was promoted in postwar Europe as “free enterprise painting.” Shahn supported labor but did graphic work for corporations, which then opposed autocracy. He experienced McCarthyism but died in 1969, as the Vietnam War dashed LBJ’s dream of a Great Society, so evaded Ronald Reagan’s fierce anti-communism and opposition to big government. Notwithstanding Martin Luther King Jr.’s conviction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Shahn’s watchfulness implied regressions, like Project 2025, recur.
Gratitude for justice, rule of law, and democracy issues from Integration, Supreme Court – though without the title the row of white male authorities reads very differently today. The painting commemorates their unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional. Shahn assembled the judges affably under a benevolent blue, bounded by a wooden bank and classical architecture. Fascists who dictate artistic style have abused Neoclassical order, but the friendly contours of Shahn’s columns and his mutually accommodating figure/ground dynamics might hope the Greek innovation of democracy – and the American Experiment – can bend without breaking. Until recently, Shahn’s oeuvre seemed a nostalgic reminder of obstacles already overcome. But in the interregnum we inhabit today – between the erosion of social progress since at least the New Deal, and the encroaching unknowns of AI dehumanization – the exhibition’s message of equality and worthy struggle resonates here and now.
“Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity,” Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. Through October 26, 2025.
About the author: Painter and art writer Margaret McCann teaches at the Art Students League. She has shown her work at Antonia Jannone in Milan and been reviewed in La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, and the Huffington Post. She edited The Figure (Skira/Rizzoli, 2014) for the New York Academy of Art and has written reviews for Painters’ Table, Art New England, and Two Coats of Paint.
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