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.

On Nonconformity

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

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.

© Estate of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

"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.