<i>Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity</i> at the Jewish Museum in New York

The Jewish Museum in New York City recently hosted Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity—a powerful and timely retrospective on Ben Shahn (1898–1969), one of the most compelling and courageous socially engaged artist-activists of the twentieth century. The exhibition was masterfully curated for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid by Laura Katzman, a professor of art history at James Madison University. She adapted and distilled the exhibition for the Jewish Museum in collaboration with the museum’s curator, Stephen Brown. The show successfully explored Shahn’s commitment to social justice causes from the depths of the Great Depression to the height of the Vietnam War. It equally illuminated the artist’s underappreciated and remarkably layered aesthetic—a figurative representational style that was indebted to photography but that also evolved into more symbolic and spiritual idioms in the post–World War II years. Shahn’s credo of nonconformity, which he formulated in the early Cold War era and believed was central to creating important art and historical change, was used to great effect as a unifying thread across the exhibition. Presenting his beliefs about the nonconformist artist as a dissenting progressive who resisted postwar standardization, the status quo, and faddish trends, the exhibition revealed how such ideas emerged in response to the political repressions of McCarthyism, and even to the dominating emergence of abstract art in the 1950s. These ideas feel urgently relevant in our current moment, when autocratic forces, among other threats to democracy, have been on the rise globally.Using a thematic approach within a rough chronology, Katzman deftly organized the exhibition into seven cogent and accessible sections that were laid out in seven sequential rooms: Art and Activism, A New Deal for Art, The Labor Movement, War and Its Aftermath, Age of Anxiety: The Cold War, The Struggle for Civil Rights, and Spirituality and Identity. Each of these sections demonstrated the artist’s interpretation of the most pressing issues of his day. Throughout the show, visitors encountered provocative and poignant pairings of photograph-inspired artworks. For example, a painting depicting Father Coughlin (1939), the pro-fascist, antisemitic “radio priest” (inspired by a 1932 press photograph of Adolf Hitler) and East Side Soap Box (1936), showing an Eastern European Jewish labor leader (based on a photograph from a 1918 issue of National Geographic), were juxtaposed on a projected wall in the first section. This set up a visual confrontation between the forces of fascism and labor and announced two critical themes of the exhibition.Shahn’s works were positioned on the walls in conversation with other artworks and ephemera in eight meticulously curated display cases created for each thematic room throughout the exhibition. Material in these vitrines revealed the artist’s fascinating working process, dominated by a reliance on photographs (his own and those of others) with all their documentary details, telescopic spaces, and even distortions. These selections enabled viewers to see that Shahn never slavishly copied photographs and often created artworks by conceptually montaging details from multiple photographs. Highlighted here were examples of his engagement with leftist publications, his collective and communal work in unions and government, and his associations and collaborations with liberals, progressives, and iconoclasts such as Diego Rivera, Bernarda Bryson, Dorothea Lange, Richard Wright, Archibald MacLeish, Muriel Rukeyser, Edward R. Murrow, and Wendell Berry. Magazines and television advertisements featuring Shahn’s commercial illustrations and innovative graphic work, and his hand-scripted books displaying his mastery of Hebrew calligraphy and book design further enriched the presentation.With such contextualizations grounding each room of the exhibition, the show offered new insights into Shahn’s artistic, social, and political worlds “to a depth rarely seen” in an exhibition, as noted in a February 2024 review of the original retrospective in Madrid in Hyperallergic.1 Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity has been described by numerous critics as long overdue and revelatory. Shahn’s work has often been siloed, leaving the impression that he was singularly a painter, illustrator, or photographer. The exhibition thus offered a special opportunity for audiences to appreciate the breadth and depth of the artist’s production and stylistic explorations, especially his experimentation in the 1950s and ’60s with the improvisational techniques of abstract expressionism.Shahn’s use of the photographic medium functioned as a subtheme for the exhibition. Indeed, for photography scholars and aficionados the exhibition was eye-opening. For even though he is known in the United States photography world as an accomplished documentary photographer—thanks in part to the pioneering research of Katzman and other scholars over the past several decades—this was the first career-spanning retrospective in the US of Shahn’s work showing the significant roles that photography played in his art in other media.2Nowhere is this more evident than in the section of the exhibition entitled A New Deal for Art, which displayed how Shahn responded with a keen and compassionate eye to the economic and environmental crises of the Great Depression. In so doing, the multiple ways photography operated in his oeuvre were brought to the fore. Katzman created a thought-provoking, multilayered installation that allowed visitors to see the photographs simultaneously as works of art, official government documents, aide-mémoires of his encounters with people, source and inspiration for his other artworks, and as mass media communication disseminated to wide publics. The curator strategically avoided the hanging of source photographs directly next to the artworks they informed so as not to create simplistic relationships between media. She opted instead for a more nuanced installation that placed source photographs (in vitrines or on adjacent walls) in close proximity to their related paintings, yet far enough away from the artworks that they invited viewers to draw the connections between media on their own.A New Deal for Art comprised two carefully curated photographic displays on facing walls in a room that also included paintings and posters as well as vitrines placed beneath each photographic grid. One wall featured Shahn’s New York City street photographs (c. 1931–36). These images show his first foray into photography, inspired by his studiomate Walker Evans and his role model Henri Cartier-Bresson, in their fresh, off-the-cuff style used to record ordinary New Yorkers in ethnic neighborhoods enduring the Depression. An enlightening historical detail the exhibition brought to light was that Shahn embraced the compact Leica camera as a sketchpad to capture images he could use for future artworks. Also in evidence was how photography served him as a tool for political activism, as illustrated by his pictures of artists marching with fellow workers in May Day parades and advocating for government relief. One vitrine included a handsome display of the Artists’ Union magazine Art Front (which Shahn edited in its early years) and the radical magazine New Theatre. They both reproduced Shahn’s urban photographs not as works of art but as he preferred, as gritty “scenes from the living theatre.”3The opposite wall presented Shahn’s New Deal photographs made for the Resettlement Administration (RA), the federal agency in operation from 1935 to 1937 that addressed the dire farm crisis and the Dust Bowl. This installation spoke to Shahn’s embrace of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relief programs and to the artist’s far-reaching contributions to the now legendary Historical Section photography project, which was transferred from the RA to the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. While it is easy to mistake Shahn’s pictures of suffering yet strong sharecroppers for those of Evans or Lange—both of whose work has been promoted more aggressively by the art world—the exhibition’s presentation of Shahn’s work for the RA demonstrated to viewers that he stood at the forefront of the RA–FSA project. Originally hired for the Special Skills Division of the RA as a graphic artist, Shahn served as an advisor to the Historical Section’s director Roy Stryker, designed brochures and exhibitions with the photographs, and played a key role in establishing what became a classic, documentary style. This style, and the RA–FSA project itself, continue to generate scholarly critique around the promises and limitations of the universalizing humanistic approach and around the agency’s role in addressing the nation’s racial and class inequities.Shahn’s New Deal photography, as it was installed in the exhibition, allowed his work to function as a case study of the complexities of the RA–FSA project. His documentary photographs on view covered a wide range, including iconic pictures of poverty-stricken farmers shown with dignity in Boone County, Arkansas, and gripping works addressing the back-breaking labor of Black cotton pickers in Pulaski County, Arkansas. The lesser-known, edgier photographs of striking steel workers in Warren, Ohio, are a revelation. These are images that Shahn did not submit to the government, likely because, as Katzman has argued elsewhere, they would not have suited the RA’s institutional agenda to persuade Congress to fund farm assistance programs.4 Shahn’s importance to the RA was brought home in the exhibition by the presence of key photobooks of the era in which his photographs were generously employed. These included MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), which incorporates an extended poem about the Great Depression, and Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), a history of Black life in America. Both books served to suggest that Shahn’s photographs were among the most circulated of the RA–FSA project in popular books and mass media at the time.5Finally, the New Deal room featured Shahn’s so-called “Sunday Paintings,” which were based on his New York and RA–FSA photographs and reflect the impact his New Deal travels had on him and his thinking; theories about the masses “melted” after he had encountered the contradictions of individuals.6 The critical role photography played in Shahn’s life and work is encapsulated in Contemporary American Sculpture (1940), a multilayered painting featured in this section. The tempera replicates an actual room in one of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual exhibitions from which Shahn was excluded. With biting wit, he added images of his own gritty, social realist paintings to the back wall of his pastiche, interrupting the gallery of pristine, abstracted sculptures. Embracing the conceptual strategy of art within art, he used his own art to create a pointed metacommentary on certain modernist art that he deemed disengaged from the real world—a commentary that was fueled by his own photographs of struggling people and harsh conditions he personally witnessed (a West Virginia mining town, a destitute farmer in rural Arkansas, and Black women at New York’s Welfare Hospital). The small paintings based on these photographs that he incorporated into Contemporary American Sculpture served as a commentary on contemporary art, the art world, and the larger society. Photography thus helped the artist endow the painting with its layered complexity, even its gravitas.Given the centrality of photography to Shahn’s social and aesthetic vision, this reviewer would have liked to have learned why he stopped photographing and if he ever picked up the camera again after his immersion in the medium in the 1930s. But what viewers did learn in the subsequent sections of the exhibition is the enduring impact that documentary and mass media photography had on Shahn’s art from the 1930s until his death in 1969. One only has to follow his skillful repurposing of his October 1935 photograph of Sam Nichols, a tenant farmer from Boone County, Arkansas, with his anxious, hand-on-chin visage, to see how the artist recognized the power of an image and its capacity to take on new meanings in new contexts. The farmer was transformed into a concentration camp victim in the painting 1943 AD (c. 1943) and into an iconic worker with a massive hand in Man (1946). At the height of McCarthyism, Shahn rendered the same figure an artist under threat in Artist and Politicians (1953), a skeletal, stylized, and abstracted version of the farmer-turned-artist holding tightly onto his brushes, the tools of his resistance. That artist-figure was used again in one of Shahn’s final images and the last work in the show, Flowering Brushes (1968). The lithograph philosophizes on the role of the artist in society at the height of the Vietnam War, using Hillel the Elder’s famous text (in Shahn’s Hebrew calligraphy) from Ethics of the Fathers as an appeal to social justice.By tracing the trajectory of Shahn’s iconic RA photographs and their complex role in his evolving practice in other media, Katzman’s pioneering research built on her canonical 2015 essay “Source Matters: Ben Shahn and the Archive.”7 Katzman further developed this research in the enlightening scholarly catalog produced in conjunction with the Shahn retrospective in Madrid, published in its second edition for the New York show.8 Informed by this new scholarship, the Jewish Museum and the original Reina Sofía exhibitions dynamically revealed that a deep knowledge of Shahn’s sources impacts the meanings and our understanding of the artworks they inspired.Walking through the painstakingly produced exhibition Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, visitors were reminded that sources mattered greatly to Shahn. But on a larger level, witnessing the artist’s compelling use of camera images across a striking array of media, we were reminded just how profoundly photography matters.