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In 1956-57, Ben Shahn was
the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (poetry
was broadly defined as "all poetic expression in language, music,
or the fine arts.") During that time he gave a series of lectures,
later collected and published by Harvard University Press. The Shape of
Content has been in print and widely read since its publication in 1957.
In fact, many people come into contact with Shahn’s writing before
they are aware of his art.
The six lectures are titled
"Artists in Colleges," "The Biography of a Painting,"
"The Shape of Content," "Modern Evaluations," "The
Education of an Artist," and "On Nonconformity," excerpted
below.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher
from
The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
© 1957 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright renewed © 1985 by Bernarda B. Shahn
The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness
by the more conservative members of society. He seems a little unpredictable.
Who knows but that he may arrive for dinner in a red shirt… appear
unexpectedly bearded… offer, freely, unsolicited advice… or
even ship off one of his ears to some unwilling recipient? However glorious
the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter.
And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young
may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may
be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall,
but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would
put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.
©
Estate of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
A great deal of the uneasiness about artists is based upon fiction;
a great deal of it also is founded upon a real nonconformity which artists
do follow, and which they sometimes deliberately exaggerate, but which
seems nevertheless to be innate in art. I do not mean to imply at all
that every artist is a nonconformist or even that most artists are nonconformists.
I dare say that if we could somehow secure the total record it would
show that an enormous majority of painters, sculptors, and even etchers
have been impeccably correct in every detail of their behavior. Unfortunately,
however, most of these artists have been forgotten. There seems to have
been nothing about them, or even about their work actually, that was
able to capture the world’s attention or affection. Who knows?
Perhaps they were too right, or too correct, but in any case we hardly
remember them or know who they were.
There was a great commotion aroused in Paris around 1925 when it was
proposed by officials that one of the pavilions of the coming Exposition
des Arts Décoratifs be housed in that space traditionally reserved
for the Salon of the Independents. It was suggested that, in view of
the new enlightenment, there was actually no further need of an Independents’
show in Paris. An indignant critic promptly offered to give twenty-five
reasons why the Independents’ show ought to be continued.
The twenty-five reasons proved to be twenty-five
names—those of the winners of the Prix de Rome over as many years,
the Prix de Rome being the most exalted award that can be extended to
talented artists by the French Government. But all these names, excepting
that of Rouault, were totally unknown to art. The critic then called
off twenty-five other names, those of artists who had first exhibited
with the Independents, who had not won a Prix de Rome, and who could
not by any stretch of the imagination have won such an award. They were
Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Degas, Derain, Daumier, Matisse, Utrillo,
Picasso, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Braque, Gauguin, Léger,
and so on and on.
This incident has great bearing upon the matter of conformity. For it
was through the questionable virtue of conformity that the Prix de Rome
winners had prevailed. That is to say, they had no quarrel with art as
it stood. The accepted concepts of beauty, of appropriate subject matter,
of design, the small conceits of style, and the whole conventional system
of art and art teaching were perfectly agreeable to them. By fulfilling
current standards drawn out of past art, the applicants had won the approval
of officials whose standards also were based upon past art, and who could
hardly be expected to have visions of the future. But it is always in
the future that the course of art lies, and so all the guesses of the
officials were wrong guesses.
© Estate of
Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
What is it about us, the public, and what is it about conformity itself
that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and
then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and
eternally celebrate those who do not?
Might not one surmise that there is some degree of nonconformity in us
all, perhaps conquered or suppressed in the interest of our general well-being,
but able to be touched or rekindled or inspired by just the quality of
unorthodoxy which is so deeply embedded in art?
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Biographer Howard Greenfeld knew Ben Shahn during
the last decade of the artist’s life, the 1960s. Years later, a
chance meeting with Shahn’s widow, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, led Greenfeld
to wonder why no complete biography had yet been written. With the full
cooperation of Shahn’s family, he undertook the project, publishing
Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life in 1998, on the centennial anniversary
of Shahn’s birth. The chapter reproduced here provides a glimpse
of Shahn, the artist and the man, at the height of his career.
Ben Shahn: An Artist's Life by
Howard Greenfeld ©1998 by Howard Greenfeld
used by permission of Random House,Inc.
Ben’s murals were now considered among the finest ever created
in America. They brought him both fame and admiration. His strikingly
effective, graphically innovative posters added to the acclaim. Unfortunately,
however, he had not had time to do the work closest to his heart. He
had completed relatively few paintings over the last few years. In 1944,
after several years spent mostly in office work, he had again been able
to devote much of his time to painting. There was a special incentive
as well: he had to prepare for his first one-man show in New York since
1940. He was back at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery (they had
apparently made up their quarrel), this time for three weeks beginning
n November 1944.
"Liberation" (1945)
Tempera on cardboard mounted on composition board, 29 3/4" x 40"
© Estate
of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The exhibit consisted largely but not exclusively
of war paintings– not scenes of battle or heroism, but pictures showing
the devastation of war and its effect on innocent people, the wanton destruction
of homes and towns and villages.
During the war, [he wrote later,] I worked in the Office
of War Information. We were supplied with a constant stream of material,
photographic and other kinds of documentation of the decimation within
enemy territory. There were the secret confidential horrible facts of
the cartloads of dead; Greece, India, Poland. There were the blurred
pictures of bombed-out places, so many of which I knew well and cherished.
There were the churches destroyed, the villages, the monasteries—Monte
Cassino and Ravenna. At that time I painted only one theme, "Europa,"
you might call it. Particularly I painted Italy as I lamented it, or
feared what it might have become.
These paintings mark a significant departure from his
earlier work. Shahn described one of them, “The Red Stairway,”
in a conversation with Henry Brandon of The Sunday Times of London.
"The Red Stairway" (1944)
Tempera on masonite, 16" x 23 5/16"
© Estate
of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
It showed a crippled man walking up an endless
stair, and then when he came to the top of that stair he went down again.
And the whole thing was in a ruin of rubble and burned-out buildings.
To me this is both the hope of man and the fate of man, you know. It’s
obvious almost, that he seems to recover from the most frightful wars,
the most faithful plagues, and goes right on again when he knows full
well that he’s going into another one; but that’s that eternal
hope in the human being.
Shahn’s gentle wit and deeply felt melancholy are
combined in other paintings that have nothing to do with the war. One
example is “Four-Piece Orchestra,” a portrait of three men playing
four instruments (one plays the guitar and harmonica at once). Their faces
are expressionless, not relating to each other but looking off in different
directions. The three men have been brought together by this music, but
the result is still loneliness and frustration. Another work, “Fourth
of July Orator,” combines satire and sadness. Three men, politicians,
occupy a raised platform in the midst of a large barren field (in the
background are the flat Bauhaus homes of Jersey Homesteads). One of the
men is delivering a speech, but no one is there to listen.
These paintings of the early 1940s reveal a maturity,
a poetry, and a psychological depth that surpass anything Ben had created
in the past. His anger is present in much of the work, but it is tempered
by a newfound compassion. Toward the end of the war his technique changed
as well, the application of translucent tones over opaque passages giving
his colors greater life and profundity. The medium is almost always tempera,
which he preferred, using honey, oxgall, gum arabic, and sometimes egg
yolk.
The change in Ben’s work was recognized by the critics.
Howard Devree of The New York Times commented:
He has risen above mere literal reflection of these times
and, with subtler brushwork than heretofore, breathes a big spirit into
these new paintings. By reason of his choice of subjects, his painting
is static rather than dynamic, but he manages somehow to invest even his
most purposeless scenes…with a truly terrific sense of the ominous
and the foreboding.
Finally, in its summary of 1944, Art News listed
Ben’s exhibition among the "Ten Outstanding One-Man Shows"
of the year, praising the artist as "a skillful master of scale and
clear focus, both in paint and perception."
As was often the case, Ben himself summed up his work
best.
The paintings which I made toward the close of
the war—the Liberation picture, The Red Stairway, Pacific Landscape,
Cherubs and Children, Italian Landscape, and quite a number of others—did
not perhaps depart sharply in style or appearance from my earlier work,
but they had become more private and more inward-looking. A symbolism
which I might once have considered cryptic now became the only means by
which I could formulate the sense of emptiness and waste that the war
gave me, and the sense of the littleness of people trying to live on through
the enormity of war. I think that at that time I was very little concerned
with communication as a conscious objective. Formulation itself was enough
of a problem—to formulate into images, into painted surfaces, feelings,
which, if obscure, were at least strongly felt.
Ben, obviously pleased by the favorable response to his
latest work, had another, and more important, reason to be gratified.
Before the 1944 exhibition, his paintings had hung in relatively few museums:
New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum; the Wadsworth
Atheneum, in Hartford; and the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis. But
the success of this most recent show generated sales to museums throughout
the country, where his work could be seen by thousands of people. In the
eyes of the public as well as the critics, he was now a major figure in
the world of American art.
During the period when Ben was celebrating his greatest
successes to date, both artistic and financial, he and Tillie were divorced.
It was, of course, no surprise to anyone. On August 30, 1943, he had been
refused a passport because of a letter from an attorney "saying that
if he is permitted to leave the United States his wife and children would
be left without support." That same year, the Bureau of Personnel
Investigation of the United States Civil Service Commission ruled that
he was "ineligible for employment on account of admitted adultery."
The divorce decree became final on October 9, 1944, with
a court order "that the marriage heretofore existing between the
plaintiff [Tillie] and the defendant [Ben] be dissolved by reason of the
defendant’s adultery, that plaintiff be freed from the obligations
thereof, and that plaintiff be permitted to marry again, but that defendant
is forbidden to marry any person other than the plaintiff during the lifetime
of the plaintiff except by express permission of the court." Tillie
was granted custody of the couple’s two children, and Ben was ordered
to pay her $100 a month, half for her support and half for the support,
maintenance, and education of the two children. (These payments would
very often be late in arriving.)
It was around this time that Judy again saw her father
after many years. She was sixteen years old and about to graduate from
New York City’s High School of Music and Art. The meeting had been
arranged by Milton Friedman, the lawyer who had represented Tillie in
the divorce proceedings. It was held in a restaurant on Third Avenue,
with Friedman, Tillie, Ben, and Judy all present. Ben spoke of a drawing
Judy had recently published in the New Masses. He was proud of what she
had done, but he suggested that she use another last name if she were
to become an artist. Though she now realizes that it was a logical and
even protective suggestion, at the time she felt rejected and disinherited.
At that same meeting, it was suggested that Ben help
pay for Judy’s college. He refused and Tillie decided to give her
daughter the full $100 a month that Ben was to send.
Just before she left for college, Judy received a $25
check from her father. He enclosed a note asking that she use it not for
anything she needed, but for some luxury. It was a difficult request to
grant; it was hard to decide what was a luxury and what was a necessity;
even necessities were luxuries for the young woman.
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