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Men in Black
John Haberin New York City
Ben Shahn
From the tall classical columns, you know this is serious business. You know it, too, from the three men in black.
They stand somberly and rigidly, the shortest man in academic robes. The other two wear black suits with tall black hats. They hold lilies, proclaiming their innocence. Their faces reveal nothing, but something is dying to get out. A hint appears in the background, where a fourth portrait appears in the form of an actual portrait, framed between pillars. He may have something to say that the three men cannot confess. 
From the columns and academic robe, this could be an institute of higher learning, with the suits its funders. It could seem freshly relevant today with Trump's assault on top universities. Maybe political art will make a comeback. But no, this is a high court, and you know this is serious as well from the open coffins in the foreground, bearing Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted of robbery and murder. Their death sentence raised more than serious doubts, from Justice Felix Frankfurter to Benito Mussolini, in one crazy, mixed-up, terrifying international affair. And it inspired a painting, a wider series, and an entire career for Ben Shahn.
Battles to fight
Everything about Ben Shahn was serious, least of all The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. No sooner had he completed that series, with twenty-three paintings, but he began another, of an Irish American labor leader convicted of a fatal bombing. The first painting has entered the Whitney Museum and reached a wide audience. One might never know that he lived nearly forty more years. During that time, he was never close enough to Modernism. He was still making what postwar abstract art dismissed as "illustration." Now the Jewish Museum calls for a reconsideration, as "On Nonconformity."
Maybe his refusal of modernity derives from his exposure to the brutality of a century. Maybe, too, it derives from the fate of an Eastern European Jew. Born in 1898 in present-day Lithuania, he came to New York with his family as a small child and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn long before its brief home to contemporary art. He had already endured plenty, but it seemed if anything to have him always looking for a home and promptly claiming it. As an adult he roamed all over with a camera, from parades, to Greenwich Village, and all the way to Alabama. He converts a photo of a handball game into a small painting that will feel like home to many a New York kid.
He returns to Judaism late in life, to set forth Ecclesiastes, the miracles of the Haggadah, or simply his appreciation of Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar. Shahn has a gift for pairing text and imagery, pressing on one another without getting in each other's way. It gives his retrospective a warm, handmade conclusion. He might be the artist always celebrating with a holiday or hallelujah. And maybe now I can see him that way. It might be better, though, to see him as out to reclaim art as highly serious.
Shahn kept up with his times in terms of battles to fight, but also who was fighting. He creates a frontispiece for E. E. Cummings, the poet and contributes to Edward Steichen for The Family of Man. He creates posters with iconic steel workers. A bit over half way through, in a section for cold-war anxiety, he sketches men in watercolor as The Existentialists. It looks back to a time when art, politics, and philosophy inspired one another. Think more recently of Postmodernism and deconstruction.
Existentialism has taken its licks over the years, and so has Shahn, though he still has hardly vanished. Keeping up with his times could not have been easy, for he lived in interesting times. And there he was, following every step of the way—from anarchism to the New Deal, the labor movement, world war, the Cold War, and postwar anxiety (with existentialists), and civil rights. He travels to India for Gandhi for tribute and South Africa with block type for breaking reports. He likes posters not just because they might make a difference, but also to press close to the picture plane. When he returns to Jewish subjects, you may wonder what he had left to celebrate.
The curators, Laura Katzman with Stephen Brown, never need to choose between a chronological and a thematic arrangement. With news like this, they can have both. But if there is one constant, it is people—from the handball court on Houston Street to apartheid. The existentialists are standing figures, because they are exposing themselves and taking a stand. Shahn traces the Civil Rights movement through faces, most often of victims. If it is all too serious, it is your choice to look away.
Brooklyn to the world
Shahn has fallen out of favor regardless—and not just because art moved on to abstraction. Nor is it that he refused the past century. That sketch of existentialists approaches the stark, jumbled planes and predominant reddish blue of Analytic Cubism. It just happens to take until the 1950s to appear. There is no getting around that posters are meant as propaganda. That great opening painting of Sacco and Vanzetti looks like a poster.
For one thing, he was out of step with the dominant media of his time. He disliked oil paint for its high gloss. He preferred tempera, from the Renaissance, with its soft matte colors, and he treated the thickness of gouache on an equal part with the transparency of watercolor. Just as much, he seems content with what he sees. You may be surprised at how much his painting of a handball court sticks to the photograph. In the two opening series, family members stand around facing stiffly front as in a selfie.
Of course, being told what to believe, even by someone rebelling against what others tell you to believe, can be cumulatively fatiguing. But Shahn runs the opposite danger. In his deep human sympathies and limited means, he risks not presenting a judgment. Everyone shares much the same grim look. Is that a way to convey the torment of J. Robert Oppenheimer after the bomb? Does it find humanity in the worst and guilt in everyone? Maybe, but I am not so sure.
In part, it reflects no more than Shahn's moral sophistication and the moral complexity of his time. Like the rest of America, he had to adjust from the evils of war to the fight against evil and back again, and no one did it better. In part, though, he was just not that clear. He poses President Truman on a piano, carrying on with Thomas E. Dewey, his 1948 opponent, at the piano. Boys in power will be boys. But then Shahn thinks better of it and shifts to the Republicans alone.
What does he think of the Supreme Court? In the course of civil rights, he wanted to celebrate Brown v. Board of Education by picturing the justices. And so he does, seated side by side on the bench. They have the same blankness as the family of anarchists so long before, and they share much the same classical edifice as The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Detachment and ambiguity are extraordinary virtues, and Shahn had them. I could not help wondering, though, whether he had fallen into them through his limitations as an artist and his need to be serious, start to finish.
He leaves an impression all the same. His show becomes a testament to others and a newsreel of his century. It is hard to resist jumping back and forth to see it afresh. In a show whose last section is "Spiritualism and Identity," what then has finally changed? Think of all his work as defining his identity and politics as his spiritualism. Think of his circles as expanding outward from Brooklyn to the world.
Ben Shahn ran at the Jewish Museum through October 23, 2025.