Why Artist Ben Shahn Embraced Nonconformity

Summary

Podcast Summary: All Of It – "Why Artist Ben Shahn Embraced Nonconformity"

Introduction to the Episode In this insightful episode of All Of It, hosted by Tiffany Hansen in place of Alison Stewart, the focus centers on the renowned artist Ben Shahn. Highlighting a comprehensive retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum titled "Ben Shahn on Nonconformity," the episode delves into Shahn's enduring legacy as a socially engaged artist who steadfastly maintained his unique voice amidst changing artistic and political landscapes.

Overview of the Exhibition Tiffany Hansen introduces the exhibition, noting its significance as the first retrospective of Ben Shahn's work in nearly five decades. The Jewish Museum's showcase features 175 pieces spanning multiple decades, emphasizing Shahn's commitment to social realism and his unwavering progressive views. Hansen remarks:

"The show examines Shahn's social realist paintings, how he advocated for his progressive views with his art never compromising to the times. And Shahn was Jewish. He immigrated to New York from the Russian Empire as a boy and grew up in Williamsburg. He dedicated himself to being an artist always within the framework of what he called nonconformity." ([00:28])

Guests Introduced Joining Hansen are two distinguished guests:

• Dr. Laura Katzman, Art History Professor at James Madison University.
• Dr. Steven Brown, Curator at the Jewish Museum.

Defining Nonconformity in Ben Shahn's Work The conversation begins with an exploration of the concept of nonconformity as articulated by Ben Shahn. Dr. Brown elaborates on how nonconformity served as both a political and artistic credo for Shahn, especially during the politically tumultuous 1950s:

"Nonconformity was a very good umbrella term, really, to call the show because it came from Shahn's own words. This was an essay that he wrote in 1957 called 'On Nonconformity,' which actually came out of his Charles Elliot Norton lectures at Harvard University." ([02:06])

Dr. Brown highlights Shahn's resistance against the pervasive abstract expressionism of his time, asserting that:

"Shahn believed that the artist is an inherent nonconformist who had to speak their truth, had to go against the grain, however unpopular, had to go against faddish trends, had to be courageous." ([02:46])

Dr. Katzman adds that nonconformity, for Shahn, was intrinsically linked to a rejection of absolutism, advocating instead for the freedom of expression across diverse artistic mediums.

Visual Cues of Nonconformity in Shahn's Art Tiffany Hansen inquires whether Shahn's nonconformity manifests visually in his artwork. Dr. Brown responds by emphasizing the diversity and evolution of Shahn's styles, noting that:

"There really is no one clue or key. It's really the freedom to express oneself not only in your own style but also to move freely between media." ([06:20])

He further explains that Shahn's ability to seamlessly transition between painting, murals, photography, and commercial work exemplifies his nonconformist approach, breaking down traditional hierarchies in the art world.

Ben Shahn's Early Life and Influences The discussion shifts to Shahn's immigrant background and early life in Williamsburg, a hub for working-class immigrants. Dr. Katzman paints a picture of Shahn's upbringing:

"The life of the immigrant that Shahn shared with thousands of other immigrants was basically very hard and economically challenged at the time, but with tremendous senses of community and a search for a purpose in America." ([08:22])

Dr. Brown adds depth by detailing Shahn's familial influences:

"His father was a socialist in Russian-controlled Lithuania. His father was an anti-Czarist activist who was banished to Siberia, made his way to South Africa, and then eventually to the United States." ([10:12])

This background fostered in Shahn a deep-seated commitment to social justice, which permeated both his life and art.

Training in Lithography and Its Impact Hansen probes into Shahn's early training in lithography, prompting Dr. Brown to explain its significance:

"Lithography is an art form that at that time involved actually kind of almost engraving into stones. Shahn was given this rigorous, disciplined training as a lithographer, a journeyman lithographer. He was responsible for commercial posters, billboards, that kind of thing." ([11:22])

This training not only honed Shahn's technical skills but also instilled a profound appreciation for typography and the power of visual communication. Dr. Brown emphasizes that:

"This set the stage for him as an artist who could engage in the commercial world, who could embrace lettering and language at an early age, who developed a very strong, potent line that really carries throughout his work." ([12:00])

The Great Depression and Its Influence on Shahn's Artistry A pivotal moment in Shahn's career was the Great Depression, which profoundly impacted his artistic trajectory. Dr. Katzman discusses how the economic hardship of the era influenced Shahn's engagement with photography:

"Shahn was really artistically on fire in the Great Depression. His response to it through photographs... brought a kind of authenticity to his work. He had seen these people with his own eyes. He had encountered them and engaged with them." ([15:23])

Shahn's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans under the Farm Security Administration allowed him to document the plight of American workers, blending his realist approach with governmental efforts to address economic suffering.

Dr. Brown further elaborates on how the New Deal era provided Shahn with opportunities to both respond artistically to societal needs and advocate for government support of the arts:

"He advocated for government support of the arts the rest of his life. It was an extraordinary time for him to see the dire poverty that was going on in the United States and to document it, which he then used to communicate and justify New Deal funding." ([15:50])

Shahn's Multifaceted Artistic Evolution Throughout the exhibition, Shahn's artistic evolution is evident. Dr. Brown notes the transition from documentary-style photography to allegorical and spiritual painting, underscoring the continuity of social justice themes across his diverse body of work.

"You really see how the artist's process and his way of going about making his imagery... All the while the social justice is sort of threaded throughout." ([07:52])

Conclusion and Exhibition Details As the conversation wraps up, Hansen invites listeners to experience the evolution of Ben Shahn's art firsthand at the Jewish Museum, where the exhibition "Ben Shahn on Nonconformity" remains on view through October 12th. She thanks the guests for their valuable insights, highlighting the enduring relevance of Shahn's work in contemporary discussions on culture and social justice.

Closing Remarks The episode concludes with a brief mention of ongoing exhibits and further research contributions, underscoring the museum's role in preserving and showcasing Shahn's impactful legacy.

Key Takeaways

• Nonconformity as a Core Principle: Ben Shahn's dedication to nonconformity was both a personal and professional stance, advocating for artistic freedom and societal progress.
• Influence of Immigrant Background: Shahn's early life in Williamsburg and his family's socialist activism deeply influenced his commitment to social justice.
• Artistic Versatility: His training in lithography and embrace of various media exemplified his nonconformist approach, breaking traditional art boundaries.
• Impact of the Great Depression: The economic hardships of the era fueled Shahn's socially engaged art, particularly through his collaborative work with the Farm Security Administration.
• Enduring Legacy: Shahn remains a pivotal figure in American art history, celebrated for his ability to blend aesthetic innovation with profound social commentary.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Dr. Steven Brown on Nonconformity:

  "Nonconformity was a very good umbrella term... Shahn believes that the artist is an inherent nonconformist who had to speak their truth." ([02:06] - [02:46])

• Dr. Laura Katzman on Immigrant Experience:

  "This is an immigrant story... it speaks on a global level to one of the most important discourses of our time, which is global migration." ([08:22] - [10:10])

• Dr. Steven Brown on Lithography Training:

  "Shahn was given this rigorous, disciplined training... this developed a very strong, potent line that really carries throughout his work." ([11:22] - [12:29])

• Dr. Laura Katzman on Great Depression Impact:

  "Photography was absolutely critical for him... he couldn't paint or document their situations without having that kind of direct contact." ([15:23] - [15:50])

Final Thoughts This episode of All Of It offers a compelling exploration of Ben Shahn's life and work, underscoring the profound interplay between an artist's personal convictions and their creative expressions. Through expert insights and detailed discussions, listeners gain a deeper appreciation for Shahn's role in shaping American cultural and artistic landscapes.

Transcript

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[Tiffany Hansen]

This is all of it. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Alison Stewart. First time in nearly 50 years you can see a retrospective of a New York hometown artist who maintained his singular voice even when it wasn't always easy to do so. The artist is Ben Shawn, and the Jewish Museum has organized a new exhibition of his work which spans multiple decades and features 175 pieces. The show examines Sean's social realist paintings, how he advocated for his progressive views with his art never compromising to the times. And Sean was Jewish. He immigrated to New York from the Russian Empire as a boy and grew up in Williamsburg. He dedicated himself to being an artist always within the framework of what he called nonconformity. The show at the Jewish Museum is fittingly called Then Ben Shahn on Non Conformity. It's on view now through October 12th. You can see a sample of the work from the show on our Instagram story at all of it wnyc. And with us now is guest curator and James Madison University ART history professor, Dr. Laura Katzman. Hi, Dr. Katzman.

[Dr. Laura Katzman]

Hello.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

Welcome.

[Tiffany Hansen]

And also Jewish.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

Great.

[Tiffany Hansen]

And also Jewish museum curator, Dr. Steven Brown. Hello, Dr. Brown.

[Dr. Laura Katzman]

Thank you, Tiffany. Great to be here.

[Tiffany Hansen]

So let's just start by talking about that word nonconformity. I'm curious, Dr. Katzman, what did Ben Shahn mean by nonconformity? And how is that maybe different from what other people might sort of imagine when they hear the word nonconformity?

[Dr. Steven Brown]

Well, thank you for that question. Nonconformity was a very good umbrella term, really, to call the show because of its. Because it came from Sean's own words. This was an essay that he wrote in 1957 called on nonconformity, which actually came out of his Charles Elliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. And it's important to note that he formulated these concepts in. In the Cold war, in the 1950s, when he himself was under political pressure, I guess you could say, in the McCarthy era, being questioned for his liberal views, as well as dealing with the rise of abstract painting and the rise of abstract Expressionism and other conceptual art, followed by conceptual art forms that became all the rage in the 1950s, especially by the late 1950s. So just that kind of gives you Some context for some of these ideas. Shawn believed that, that this was his credo, really his credo, his political and his artistic credo for freedom of expression. For him, the non conform. The artist is the non conformist. The artist is an inherent non conformist who had to speak their truth, had to go against the grain, however unpopular, had to go against faddish trends, had to be courageous. That was the only way to create great art and to move society forward. Forward. So this became a great umbrella concept for, for the exhibition, which we hope advocates for Shawn being one of the most influential and consequential socially engaged artists in the United states in the 20th century.

[Tiffany Hansen]

Just out of curiosity, are there other artists that you would put under that sort of non conformist umbrella?

[Dr. Steven Brown]

Well, it's. It's a hard question to answer because one could say that the abstract expressionists who emerged in the 1950s might have seen themselves as non conformists. I think the. The term really is. Is going against the grain, Right? It's going against the grain. So if abstract artists felt that they were going against the grain of figurative realism, then they could see themselves as non conformists. Right. So I think that it's a. A term that is. How should I say? It's, it's broad enough to encompass many points of view.

[Tiffany Hansen]

Right. So non conformity is in the eye.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

Of the beholder in, in many ways. That's right. That's right. And, and also I think it's important to link it to absolutism because Sean was indignant about absolutism, indignant that it was a danger to society. That is one point of view, one point of view, whether it be one way, one direction in art, in politics and philosophy. So he really was a First Amendment kind of guy in the sense that it was more freedom of expression the better. He railed against abstraction because he did not think that it was connected to the human prospect, as he said, but he certainly didn't want to shut it down. He certainly believed that all artists had the right to express themselves in the way that they felt best. And in fact, he engaged deeply with abstract artists in the 1950s in symposia conferences and really wanted to have a debate about, about the direction of American art. So he really was a free thinker in that, in that regard.

[Tiffany Hansen]

And I, I would assume that by the very definition of the word nonconformity, there is no sort of visual cue to us as just, you know, enjoyers, lookers, onlookers of artists and art, that there is no visual cue that we need to be looking for is there. But is there something, I guess, writ large, right, about non conformity because it does take so many forms. But is there some thing that you can point to in Sean's work that is a visual cue to his non conformity?

[Dr. Steven Brown]

That's complicated to answer because he had such a diverse evolution, you know, from this very documentary style based on photography. Very indebted to photography in his early years when he was speaking out against injustice. And then a more universalizing kind of style emerged in the. An allegorical style emerged in the post war period. And then he moves to a. A kind of more lyrical spiritual style in his late work. All the while the social justice is sort of threaded throughout. So I would say that there's really no one clue or key. I think it's really the freedom to express oneself not only in your own style, but also to move freely between media. I think there's a kind of seamless comfort that Sean had moving from painting to murals, to photography, to commercial work, to book design. It really was quite extraordinary, the breadth and depth of his range and of styles. And I suppose artists can feel confined to one style, to one type of work. And he kind of broke down the hierarchy really between so called fine art and commercial art, which was considered low brow art. And he was an image maker. He was an image maker and he believed in the power of the image to communicate no matter what media that was.

[Tiffany Hansen]

Dr. Brown, I want to talk a little bit about that early life, about Sean's early life. So just, just give us a little history. I mentioned a little bit of it in the intro. He was born in 1898 in what is present day Lithuania was then the Russian Empire. He moved to Williamsburg. What do we know about his early life there and what Williamsburg was like at that point and how it sort of was a, you know, sort of a fertile ground for someone like him.

[Dr. Laura Katzman]

I. The impression I have from the data is that the life of the immigrant that Sean shared with thousands of other immigrants was basically very hard and economically challenged at the time, but with tremendous senses of community and a search for a purpose in America. Really. There's one beautiful painting in the show. It's a visionary work really. And it's related to the muralism with which Siam became associated as a major public artist. And that really that picture is a vision based on a mural that he was going to make for the Jersey Homesteads, which was the place in New Jersey where the immigrant population eventually were going to be placed away. From the squalor of the Lower east side. And I think Sian in that painting, you can really feel that Sian knows every single coordinate of that immigrant experience, from the pogroms, really, of the Russian Empire, all the way through to the seders on the Lower east side, all the way through to the, hopefully, the utopia of a new beginning in the new world. And so, yeah, I would say it's throughout almost, in a way, it's written throughout the show that this is an immigrant story. And of course, because of that, it speaks on a global level to one of the most important discourses of our time, which is global migration, not just in America, but all over the world. And so I think that resonance will be felt and is being felt by many people who visit the show.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

May I weigh in on that? On Williamsburg?

[Tiffany Hansen]

Of course.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

I just wanted to enhance what Stephen was saying. It was a teeming neighborhood of, or location for working class immigrants of Sean's background. And so he grew up with a great deal of socialistic feeling, socialistic mindset. His father was a socialist in. In Russian controlled Lithuania. His father was an anti czarist activist who was banished to Siberia, made his way to South Africa and then eventually to the United States. So I like to say that his social justice inclinations were in his DNA and then they were reinforced certainly by the working class immigrant environments that he grew up in, because they were very pro labor. Pro labor union. He was taken out of school at age 14, 15 to support the family. And he was apprenticed to a lithographer in a lithography workshop, a commercial lithography workshop.

[Tiffany Hansen]

You just dovetailed right into my next question perfectly, thank you. Describe for people who don't know what lithography is and then talk about his training there.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

Lithography is an art form that at that time involved actually kind of almost engraving into stones. And Sean was given this rigorous, disciplined training as a lithographer, a journeyman lithographer. He was responsible for commercial posters, billboards, that kind of thing. But also at that time, the lithographer had an extraordinary training in typography and letters, type, type. And this served him very well for the rest of his career. He was very angry that his family took him out of school because he really wanted to study. And he did study in the evening and eventually got his high school diploma. But this really set the stage for him as an artist who could engage in the commercial world, who could. Who embrace lettering and language at an early age, who developed a line, a Very strong, potent line that really carries throughout his work. And as Stephen Brown and I have talked about, again, the discipline, the discipline of this kind of training served him very, very well.

[Tiffany Hansen]

Yeah, Dr. Brown, I want to get to. You know, you mentioned the sort of impact of his immigrant community and what that had on him as a person and on his art as well. One of the. One of the other moments in history that had a great impact on him was the Great Depression. So describe that for us what sort of an impact that had on him.

[Dr. Laura Katzman]

I think, obviously Sean was. If you go through this exhibition, it's very important to see the various phases of Shawn's career and art. And in fact, the depression of such is not titled or named. It's not actually a section in the show. But it begins with his involvement in photography and his work, moving out of his own interests, working with, alongside his great friend Walker Evans, with photography. Just to back up a little bit. This was really his way into the image making as a public artist that he wanted to do. And it jived perfectly with Roy Stryker's brief, which was to document the south in America, which was suffering from all the horrors of the Dust bowl, and what was happening to the agricultural communities across America. That dovetailed perfectly because Sean was sent to document those workers. So he was dragged. Not only did he experience depression, with all of its poverty and difficulties personally, but he was thrown into the position of actually experiencing it through the lives of many Americans.

[Tiffany Hansen]

And we will see, we will see some of these photographs in the exhibit.

[Dr. Laura Katzman]

Laura has done a great deal of work and we're indebted to all of tremendous research and previous publications. But we do have an opportunity in this show. I'm rather surprised about it because, you know, it's a lot of data to compress into a relatively small gallery space, but we've got both his work in New York, photographing the populations at street level in a very gritty, realist way. And we also have, against that, we have the documentation, or some of the documentation from the Farm Security Administration he worked for. And so it's an amazing segue really, into the next section of the exhibition where that investment in photography and as it were, the quintessential or realist art par excellence of the 20th century, then becomes moved into posters and murals. You really do see, both for art lovers and the general public, but particularly for artists, you actually see how this, the artist's process and his way of going about making his imagery.

[Dr. Steven Brown]

If I can add to that the. The idea of the great the, the context of the Great Depression is absolutely central to Shawn's work. He was really artistically on fire in the, in the Great Depression. His response to it through photographs, as Stephen said, posters, working for the government, first working on his own and then working for the government. Like many artists on the left, able to embrace the New Deal, the idea of artists actually being hired in the middle of a Great Depression, in the middle of an economic crisis to actually respond to what was going on in society was very motivating for him and really stuck with him the rest of his life. He advocated for government support of the arts the rest of his life. So it was an extraordinary time for him to also see the dire poverty that was going on in the United States and to document it, which he then used. The government used it obviously to bring a relief to people, to also speak to the New Deal programs but unjustify the funding that was going to help farmers. But also as a body of work that he was building, that he was going to draw on the rest of his life. It was photography brought a kind of authenticity to his work. He had seen these people with his own eyes. He had encountered them and engaged with them. And he didn't feel he could paint or document their situations without having that kind of direct contact. So photography was absolutely critical for him. And the New Deal section really establishes that.

[Tiffany Hansen]

And we'll have to leave it there. We'll see the evolution of this artist. Ben Shahn at the museum, at the Jewish Museum. It's on display. Display through October. Thanks so much to our guests, Dr. Laura Katzman, Dr. Steven Brown. We appreciate your time today.

[Dr. Laura Katzman]

Thank you.

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