Ben Shahn
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BORN IN RUSSIA in 1898, the son of a carpenter, Shahn came to this country with his family at the age of eight. His training as a draftsman was early and thorough. Still in his 'teens, he was employed as a lithographer's apprentice and supported himself at this exacting trade during his studies at New York University, City College of New York and the National Academy of Design. His youth as lithographer and student unquestionably accounts in good part for the technical certainty and iconographical richness of his mature work.
It was from the moral pressure of contemporary events, however, that Shahn caught fire as an artist. Returned from two trips to Europe in the late 1920's, he suddenly became aware that art for him could not be reduced to terms of esthetic sensation alone, that humanity's woes and evils were his instinctive concern. He thereupon painted series of small gouache pictures on the celebrated cases of Sacco-Vanzetti and Tom Mooney. Throughout the 1930's and 1940's, Shahn continued to put his talents to public-social use, painting murals for Federal buildings, designing posters whose strength is their compassion, expressed through eloquent pictorial means.
But Shahn had never ceased being one of the most lyrical and individual of our contemporary easel painters, steadily more fluent, unflagging in invention and never forgetful of the human pulse. His art had become relatively abstract by comparison with earlier works. It had never become aloof or contrived. His poetry as an artist was in the service of his fellow-men. And poetry it was, of a very high order.
Shahn: The making of a picture is an experience of intense and protracted awareness. The content and qualities of the experience differ widely; they may be intellectual or emotional or merely operative. There may be great doubt and struggle involved in the effort to bring the whole work up to a certain pitch at which it may be arrested and maintained; or the effort may be a flowing, easy one of confident virtuosity, the object still being to arrest and make permanent the unique, immediate experience. If the work is successful; if such sustained awareness is impregnated into the physical materials, the colors and forms, so that it dominates and transcends them, then I believe the work lives permanently, communicating its pitch and intensity and arousing a responsive awareness within those persons who look at it.
That is only the basic aesthetic act, or experience, and it does not touch upon the relative immensity or triviality of the images into which are transmuted the physical materials of art. It is within the stature and kind of the images created that the fuller meanings of art lie. Its primary fact, however, is the crystallizing of a state of awareness.
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