Ben Shahn: An Artist's Life
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898 and emigrated to New York with his family in 1906. Trained as a lithographer, Shahn created social realist paintings of controversial subjects such as Sacco and Vanzetti. He worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, and later created his own public murals in Washington, New York, and New Jersey. In 1935, Walker Evans invited him to join the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. As a photographer, Shahn documented the Depression in the American South with Evans and Dorothea Lange. During the war years, he worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) producing propaganda posters before returning to painting. Toward the end of his life he worked as a commercial artist, taught and wrote about art, including The Biography of a Painting(1956) and The Shape of Content (1960). Howard Greenfeld's biography is the first complete life of the artist and is illustrated with 90 of his photographs, pictures, and paintings.
“Howard Greenfeld’s approach scrupulously balances the personal and the political to provide a rounded portrait... gives a convincing sense of a determined individual making his mark as an immigrant in the turbulent America of depression and war, social upheaval and reaction.” — David Cohen, The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The centenary of socially conscious artist Ben Shahn's birth brings at least two salutes: an upcoming exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum and Greenfeld's (The Devil and Dr. Barnes) competent if workmanlike biography. "I hate injustice," Shahn (1898-1968) told an interviewer in 1944. "I've hated it ever since I read a story in school." That troubling biblical story of an unjust God is not the only influence that Greenfeld, the founder of Orion Press and a friend of Shahn's in the artist's later years, traces to his subject's youth. Explaining Shahn's graphic style of blending art and words, Greenfeld recalls the artist's childhood in Lithuania when, too poor to buy paper, he sketched in the margins of books. Once in the U.S., Shahn parlayed this skill into work as a commercial lithographer. His first steps as an independent artist coincided with the Depression, so Shahn's early career relied heavily on the Roosevelt administration's visionary schemes, described admirably by Greenfeld. In 1931, Shahn mixed social protest and art in a series that would set his course and make his reputation--The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although Greenfeld includes stories of Shahn's failed first marriage and his troubles during the Red Scare, the real human touches are rare (as in the description of Shahn's second wife baking a great many angel food cakes while helping her husband complete an egg tempera mural for a Bronx post office). Also, while Greenfeld repeats Clement Greenberg's charge that Shahn's work was "rarely effective beyond a surface facility," he offers little other critical analysis. For the biography of an artist usually associated with fiery commitment, this has a wooden, even perfunctory tone. Illustrations not seen by PW. FYI: In December, Princeton Unversity Press will publish Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, a companion to the exhibition at the Jewish Museum. ($45 197p )
