Ben Shahn
ln...@columbia.edu
Ben Shahn was one of the foremost Social Realist artists of the 1930s.
At the outset we have to recognize that this movement arose in
response to the political/esthetic directives of Stalin's government.
The original Constructivist style that emerged with the victory of the
Bolsheviks was basically outlawed and Soviet artists either adapted to
the new agenda or left the country.
Ironically, while the style became identified with the cultural and
political retreat of the Soviet Thermidor, in the west--particularly
the United States--it reflected an upturn in the revolutionary
movement. Nobody needed to dictate to artists that they should serve
the revolutionary movement. The objective forces of history were
sufficient to do that. In David Shapiro's introduction to his "Social
Realism: Art as a Weapon," a collection of articles by artists and
critics both for and against the movement in the 1930s, there's a
useful summary of Social Realism:
"Social Realism is not an art of the studio--rarely does one see a
painting of the model, costumed or nude, and even less frequently is a
still life encountered. Social Realism's only landscapes are at least
partly cityscapes--a decaying mining village, or shacks along the
railroad tracks. A variety of genre painting, Social Realism takes as
its main subject certain significant or dramatic moments in the lives
of ordinary poor people. The moments in their lives selected (and it
is always a moment in someone's life--it is hard to think of Social
Realist painting that does not include a human being) are almost
always those that in some way focus on the indignity or pathos of
their situation--the hard work they perform. the inadequate rewards
they receive for it, or the miserable conditions they work under.
There is almost always, implied or explicit, a criticism made of the
capitalist system. With this as their subject matter, Social Realists
perforce showed those aspects of American life that were the least
'pretty.' Not for them to glory in the soaring mountains, or, for that
matter, in the soaring skyscrapers. Instead, they painted the people
in the slums, the industrial suburbs, the factory towns, and sometimes
on the farm. When rich people appear, they are the objects of
satirical derision: art patrons unable to understand the pictures they
look at, dowagers attending opera for snob reasons only, millionaires
dining in splendor half the world goes hungry."
This is the esthetic world that Ben Shahn emerges from. Along with
other notables such as Philip Evergood and William Gropper, Shahn was
part of the CP-dominated cultural front that the Trotskyist
intellectuals derided. This was not art, but propaganda, according to
the precepts of Meyer Shapiro and Clement Greenberg. Such easy
dismissal must be critically re-evaluated, as Alan Wald, a
post-Trotskyist literary critic, has attempted to do in the literary
field, with particular emphasis on the "proletarian novel". We have to
consider the possibility that, for all its flaws, Social Realist art
has much more to say to us today as people who are striving to
transform the world. Rather than being some kind of one-dimensional
cartoon, the work of Ben Shahn has the sort of humanitarianism that is
the inner essence of all attempts to transform the world.
Shahn was born in 1898 in Kovno, Lithuania, the first of five children
of a traditional Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a woodcarver
and cabinetmaker. Sometimes we can lose sight of how oppressed Eastern
European Jews were in this period. They faced discrimination and
violence everywhere they turned. When the Russian Revolution of 1917
declared war on all forms of anti-Semitism, Jews instinctively turned
toward the new government. In a fascinating oral history collection
titled "Followers of the Trail: Jewish working-class radicals in
America," author David Leviatin presents the testimony of Harry M.:
"At that time there was truly no antisemitism. It was forgotten. We
were proud, we were equal citizens, we could travel anywhere we
wanted, we could get any job we wanted, we were free to live wherever
we wanted. No discrimination. The Jews were very happy. Antisemitism
didn't show except in reactionary circles. Those that were in the
counterrevolutionary movement, they blamed everything on the Jews.
It's not a question of a Russian being a Communist. Jew and Communist
was synonymous, and that was their propaganda.
"But Jews had their full rights, like everybody else. They were the
leaders, they were the members of the soviets, they were the members
of the government. The Gentiles that were with the Red Army had no
opposition to it. I think there was even a law then that if you abused
a Jew or used the words 'dirty Jew' you were getting six months in
jail."
The subjects of Leviatin's book are literally the social base of Ben
Shahn's artwork. They were working-class New York Jews of the
Communist Party, now in their 80s and 90s, who founded a summer camp
in 1929 called "Followers of the Trail." Most were garment workers,
who had fled Russia before the revolution, as Shahn had. There were a
network of such summer retreats throughout upstate New York, where
workers and their children would escape the summer heat. They sang
Soviet folk songs, attended meetings to hear about the Spanish Civil
War, picked berries, and played pinochle. When I was a young child
growing up in this area, these workers were still vigorous and
outspoken. They were the same old-timers who would fill Union Square
Park in NYC on Sunday afternoon to argue about politics. Now it is
filled with young lawyers and investment bankers rushing to their
dinner engagements, talking on their cell phones.
While Shahn was not an observant Jew, Jewish identity remained
prominent in his work from the beginning to the end. This was
expressed in many different ways, but primarily it had to do with the
immigrant experience, which he was part of himself. Jews had not yet
been assimilated into American society and Shahn was anxious to
express their vulnerability, which he felt despite his success in the
art world. Even before Shahn had become famous for his Sacco and
Vanzetti series, his first socially conscious work took Alfred Dreyfus
as the subject.
Immigration was perhaps the number one subject for American Jews in
1939, when Shahn painted a mural for the St. Louis Post Office. The
Nazis passed the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, which legally disenfranchised
Jews who were now classified as non-citizens. Shahn brushed aside
state government suggestions to paint about St. Louis history.
Although the mural did address regional history through the westward
migration of the 19th century, the main focus of the mural was
European immigration and the plight of the Jews. He contrasts images
of families beginning a new life with babies and bundles in hand,
against images of concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire.
As David Shapiro pointed out, this kind of mural art was not created
in studios for the private collector. The primary medium was the
public mural and no other event captures the revolutionary mission of
Social Realist artists than the Rockefeller Center mural, which pitted
creator Diego Rivera against the young Nelson Rockefeller. Shahn not
only worked on the mural, but fiercely defended the right of the
artists to define the subject matter, including portraits of Lenin and
Trotsky.
Howard Greenfeld's new biography of Shahn, titled "Ben Shahn: an
artist's life," details his role. Rivera had hired Shahn, after
discovering his Sacco and Vanzetti series. The relationship between
Rivera and Shahn mirrors the one between Siqueiros and Pollock, with
shared enthusiasms over politics and artistic style. While Pollock
eventually veered off into the sort of "art for art's sake"
studio-based work that Shahn eschewed, Shahn never lost sight of his
original mission.
The theme of the mural was to be "Man at the Crossroads." Rivera
interpreted this as a choice between capitalism and socialism and left
no room for ambiguity in the original sketch for the mural. It seems
that 1930s Social Realists allowed themselves maximum flexibility, as
Shahn's encounter with the St. Louis Post Office indicated. Rivera and
Shahn were cut from the same cloth. Social justice meant more than the
petty concerns of their patrons, either private or public.
The capitalist side of the mural alluded to unemployment and gambling,
while the socialist side depicted workers holding banners high,
singing and smiling as they marched down the road. Shahn helped Rivera
fill in the details of the unemployment piece in the mural by bringing
in photos of a violent demonstration on Wall Street. Rivera painted
directly from the photos, which depicted mounted police ready to
attack.
Rockefeller had a change of heart as the mural neared completion.
Since the portrait of Lenin "might seriously offend a great many
people," he asked Rivera to substitute it with an "unknown man."
Rivera came up with a counter-proposal. Instead of Lenin, he would be
happy to include a famous figure out of America's revolutionary past
and offered a choice of Lincoln, John Brown, Nat turner, William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ben Shahn was not
happy with this proposal and protested to Rivera.
On May 9th, workmen covered the mural with wood planks. The building
was surrounded by mounted cops, who seemed to have leapt from the
unemployment section of the mural. Five days later, a "United Front"
committee sprang into existence to protest the banning of the mural.
According to Greenfeld, "a near riot broke when the various
factions--among them the official Communists and dissidents like the
Trotskyites and the Lovestoneites--noisily attacked one another."
Shahn assumed leadership of the protestors, restoring peace by
announcing that representatives from the fifteen organizations that
made up the United Front would picket Radio City between six and eight
the following evening. A man after my own heart.
Shahn's political and ethnic concerns were knitted together on the
occasion of his move to the Jersey Homesteads in 1936. This housing
cooperative was to be built in conjunction with new garment shops in
the area, so as to allow New York's primarily Jewish workforce to work
in more humane conditions than they had ever experienced. The Jersey
Homesteads was the dream of Benjamin Brown, a Ukrainian Jew who had
emigrated to the United States and worked his way through agricultural
school in Pennsylvania. Greenfeld describes him as having an
"obsessive interest" in setting up cooperative settlements throughout
the United States. I suspect that Brown was strongly influenced by the
Jewish agricultural cooperative movement of the late 19th and early
20th century. In a move that paralleled the Zionist movement, many
Jews thought that their emancipation was only possible through a
return to the land. Agricultural colonies were launched in Argentina,
upstate New York, New Jersey and Palestine. The farmers who settled in
Palestine were not Zionists as much as they were agrarian socialists.
The Russian Revolution tended to focus Jewish left-wing efforts on the
urban, trade union movement from 1917 onward, but it is clear that the
Jersey Homesteads retained aspects of these earlier experiments.
At the Jersey Homesteads, Shahn was free at last from outside
interference. There were no Nelson Rockefellers around to dictate who
was "politically correct" or not. (In reality, political correctness
has been the dominant feature of capitalist society from its
inception. It only became an issue when the left wing decided to
assert itself in the 1980s.) The most glaring challenge to Shahn's
artistic freedom would occur in 1938 when Shahn decided to feature
Walt Whitman prominently in a mural for the Bronx Post Office.
Whitman, it turned out, was on the Catholic Index, because of his
"irreligion." Although no other reasons were put forward, one can only
surmise that it had much more to do with Whitman's sexual orientation
than anything else.
Rightwingers were mobilized to hassle Shahn. One day a woman
complained to him that he was defacing the post office with all those
"Communist workers" on the wall. This was a particular offense to her
because her ancestors had fought in the American revolution. He got so
angry that he kicked over a paint bucket. He then told her that his
ancestors had fought in the battle of Jericho, but he didn't go around
bragging about it.
As WWII began, and as the Soviet Union became less of a pole of
attraction for many Americans, Shahn was not immune from the same sort
of depoliticization that affected Pollock and the Abstract
Expressionist school. He turned away from murals, which actually were
being commissioned less frequently, and began to turn his attention to
studio paintings. The political themes became more muted, although
there was never a retreat from the horrible realities of the 1940s.
It didn't matter much that Shahn had adapted to political and artistic
realities by the late 1940s. He had been tagged as a Social Realist
and the political and artistic establishment had decided to
marginalize such people.
The most dramatic expression of Shahn's isolation was his reception at
Black Mountain College, over a four week visit to the college in the
summer of 1951. He was to teach an art class upon the invitation of
Charles Olson, the president of the college. Although Olson had
fostered modernist experimentation at the school, he still had strong
attachments to the New Deal politics of his pre-writing days. Olson
had been a high official in FDR's administration, before obsessions
with Moby Dick had convinced him that his true vocation was poetry.
Shahn was an icon of his Olson's youth. Olson, who was one of the most
moody and curmudgeonly characters of 20th century literature, drew
Shahn aside to comfort him when he discovered that his wife had
developed a breast tumor. He told Shahn that he would stand with him
against "all these little shit painters" at the college. In the next
breath Olson dressed Shahn down because his art had stood still for
more than three years.
One of the nastiest little shits at Black Mountain was fellow faculty
member Robert Motherwell, the ex-Trotskyist and bourgeois figure who
had made the initial connections between heiress Peggy Guggenheim and
the painters in his group in the 1930s. Motherwell, like Pollock, had
become a real big shot and scourge of all the left-wing artists. At a
conference held at the MOMA in 1947, Motherwell red-baited Shahn as
"the leading Communist modern artist in America."
This was the "party line" of the Abstract Expressionists and their
hangers-on: give credit to Shahn's achievements while belittling him
as a curiosity. In a Nation Magazine review of a Ben Shahn
retrospective at the MOMA in that same year, ex-Trotskyist Clement
Greenberg wrote maliciously:
"On the whole Shahn's art seems to have improved with time. The later
pictures become more sensitive and more painterly. That his 'social
consciousness' has at the same time become less prominent does not, in
my opinion, play much of a role here; it is simply that Shahn gains
better control of his medium as he goes along. Yet there has been a
certain loss of vigor. Nothing improves on or repeats the shock of
Handball. There is an attempt to strengthen and vary color, but to
little avail. Shahn, more naturally photographer than painter, feels
only black and white, and is surest of himself when he orients his
picture in terms of dark and light. All other chromatic effects tend
to become artificial under his brush.
"This art is not important, is essentially beside the point as far as
ambitious present-day painting is concerned, and is much more
derivative than it seems at first glance. There is a poverty of
culture resources, a pinchedness, a resignation to the minor, a
certain desire for "quick" acceptance--all of which the scale and
cumulative evidence of the present show make more obvious. Yet Shahn
has a genuine gift, and that he has not done more with it is perhaps
fault of the milieu in which he has worked, even more than his own."
This "milieu" that Greenberg refers to contemptuously are immigrant
Jewish garment workers, who defined not only Shahn's own esthetic and
political principles, but his own as well at an earlier time in his
life. Shahn took all this in stride and continued to create works that
were addressed to the masses rather than the art market. Although
he--and nobody else--could make paintings about the labor movement any
more, he did dedicate himself to raising people's consciousness about
the dangers of nuclear war. Deeply distressed by Hiroshima and the
nuclear arms race, Shahn illustrated a series of articles in Harpers
Magazine during 1957 about Japanese fishermen who had been exposed to
radiation in the waters off Bikini atoll. This new cause consumed him
with the sort of passion that the labor movement had inspired in him
decades earlier.
I am not interested in Shahn's place in the hierarchy of great
artists. I don't have the background to "grade" him and this sort of
competition is frankly expressive of the degradation of late
capitalism. Contests to pick the top 50 novels or artists of the 20th
century are argued out with the same frenzy as those involving who are
the top 50 basketball players.
What does interest me are the two contrasting social roles of artists.
Jackson Pollock starts out in the same manner as Hecht, but ends up as
an alcoholic careerist. The appetite for success can never be
completely satisfied in bourgeois society. The commodity not only
raises expectations in the consumer that can never be satisfied, it
also frustrates the producer of the commodity who has to compete with
other producers for a chimerical market. If this profit-maximizing
mechanism ever grinds to a halt, the system would fall apart. It is a
system based on the treadmill of desire. Like rats, we rush ahead
trying to snatch the piece of cheese that is always an inch in front
of our nose.
Shahn had very little interest in this sort of pursuit. Although he
believed in his work, he believed in social justice and peace more.
Jackson Pollock's death by automobile accident in some ways marks the
end of an era: Abstract Expressionism in its ascendancy. What follows
it is art stripped of any overarching esthetic or political goals.
People like Andy Warhol capture this postmodernist--and I use this
term advisedly--mood perfectly.
In my next post, I want to explore how the radical art movement of the
1930s lingered on into the 50s and early 60s and shaped our
contemporary culture. This story of how this reconfigured popular
front culture influenced not only the new poetry movement, but other
artistic forms as well, is a fascinating story. In a very real sense,
the political and cultural world of the left wing of today has its
roots in the Social Realism of the 1930s. My final post will consider
the world of pop art, the avant-garde and the artist as entrepreneur.
Cyberexhibits of Shahn's work can be linked to from:
http://www.auburn.edu/~folkegw/univ/arboadva.htm
--Louis Proyect
(For Marxist discussion: www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)