Men in Black

John Haber
in New York City

Ben Shahn and the Neue Sachlichkeit

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.

Not that early modern art as confrontation was left to the United States. Far from it. Nor was a certain literalism in sending a message. Just one hundred years ago, a show opened in Mannheim with one eye on the future and a middle finger squarely in the public's face. It was 1925, and Germany's loss in World War I was not just a bitter memory. Soldiers came home to a shortage of affordable housing, the ruins of a wartime economy, and a new art.

It was time to make demands, on art and on society. It was time for a Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Now if only its dreams could survive the Great Depression and the Nazis—and if only the artists could agree on their objective. For now, they will just have to find what common ground they can at the Neue Galerie. It could be enough to revive a movement. It could be enough to put American art of its time to shame.

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.

The object in question

Modern art in Germany had always had a confrontational spirit and a shortage of optimism, and the very idea of a New Objectivity may sound like a cruel joke. But then the movement made no excuses for starting over. This was no time for German Expressionism, with its implication of escaping reality. A smaller show, from the Kellen collection, has all that you might expect in wild colors and subjective impressions, from Gustav Klimt and decorative portraits to Wassily Kandinsky and the Blue Rider. If a new movement, in contrast, came with contradictions, it also came with the promise of things as they are. Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub of Mannheim's school of art had given it a name two years before, and even he thought it encompassed two directions that he could hardly reconcile.

Sachlichkeit in German can refer to the facticity of things or the facts, and Hartlaub distinguished "verists," who faced a gritty industrial present, from "classicists," who gave the future a more perfect union. If that were not enough, the Neue Galerie finds room for proletarian realism and Cologne progressives as well. It sees a meeting of art and technology, too, including the work of the Bauhaus, founded in 1919. The curator, Olaf Peters, includes Oskar Schlemmer's painting of the Bauhaus that long graced the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art. It has Marcel Breuer chairs as well. If they are off limits to visitors, the future takes time to arrive.

It may arrive with a felt ambivalence as well. Marianne Brandt at the Bauhaus designed a clock, a telephone, a desk tray, an ashtray, and more. Nothing was beneath her. Models posed for ads for fancy jewelry, and nothing was above them. Still, a proper critique had to extend to consumerism. When an unemployed worker bares her shoulders to Otto Dix, the promise of sexual favors extends to neither one.

Reality here is treacherous, proletarian or not, but seeing it is half the battle. When photos by August Sander capture ordinary workers, they become individuals. Who needs Max Beckmann and his assault on Berlin nightlife when they can emerge into daylight? Other works focus on children, caring for dolls and one another. Others have the dignity of doctors, sowers, or educated readers. Still, it is a dangerous moment in a harsh world.

Exploiters may share the dangers with the working class. When capitalists meet for Georg Scholz or Franz M. Jansen, they cannot drop their pipes, their scowls, or their masks. When high society gathers around a felt table to make plans, most outright headless and mindless, the businessman looks like Donald J. Trump with a mustache, and a general sets down his bloody sword. A blind man's dog looks bloodthirsty himself. Factories devoid of life for Carl Grossberg, though, look gorgeous. The future may be nearing after all.

Art here all but denies the contradictions, and such as the price of a movement. It also leaves names that few will care to remember. Yet they make real demands, including the demand to face the alternatives. A row of portrait busts runs from youth and determination to near abstract sculpture to a robotic mask. A doctor shares a room of portraits with a madman, because who is not a madman or a patient? The convex mirror above the doctor's head wants to know.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Ben Shahn ran at the Jewish Museum through October 23, 2025, the Neue Sachlichkeit at the Neue Galerie through May 26, and the Kellen collection there through May 5.