Exhibition Review

The current wave of Ben Shahn scholarship indicates a renewed interest in the American artist. In the past four years, four dissertations (by Susan Harris Edwards, Laura Katzman, DeAnna Beachley, and Diana Linden) and a new biography, Ben Shahn: An Artist's Life (by Howard Greenfeld) have focused on Shahn. It is fitting that the Jewish Museum chose the centennial year of Shahn's birth to launch the first major retrospective of the American Jewish artist's work held in twenty-two years. "Common Man, Mythic Vision" features fifty-two paintings created by Ben Shahn between 1936 and 1965. Major sponsors of the exhibition were Ernst & Young LLP, the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorot Foundation.	1
According to the catalog introduction by the exhibition curator, Susan Chevlowe, Shahn was known as a social realist but a deeper look reveals that "his life and art seem to defy such narrow categorization." As a result of this assumption, the paintings gathered for the exhibition were carefully selected to dramatize the mythic and religious elements in his later work. Most of the rooms in "Common Man, Mythic Vision" are devoted to paintings completed during and after World War II. These later images present a lesser-known side of Shahn. In the descriptive panels accompanying the paintings, Shahn emerges as a mature artist who celebrated a personal resurgence of Jewish feeling and heritage in paintings that confirmed his belief in the regenerative power of art.	2
Separate rooms effectively demonstrate different phases of Shahn's life. At each entry, a narrative panel briefly contextualizes major events of his time. In the first room, biographical information, including discussions of Jewish assimilation and topical events, such as World War I and family photographs, are furnished to help viewers understand his evolution as an artist. The second, larger room is devoted to the 1930s and contains studies for murals and the "Sunday" paintings, so dubbed because they were completed on weekends when Shahn was not working on government projects. Study for Jersey Homesteads Mural (1936) and East Side Soap Box (Study for Jersey Homesteads Mural) (1937) provide glimpses of elements Shahn incorporated in the community center mural for the Resettlement Administration community, Jersey Homesteads, New Jersey. Explanatory statements accompanying these images reveal Shahn's work with government art projects and his occasional use of easel paintings to respond to critical attacks on his murals. Myself among the Churchgoers (1939) is a sarcastic image that directly rebuts criticisms of a Walt Whitman poem Shahn included in the Bronx Central Post Office mural, a project funded through the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture. Such encounters, according to one descriptive panel, and Shahn's disappointment with "partisan politics" transformed his art from the specific commentary of social realism toward an increasingly personal vision. The panel provides no discussion of which partisan politics he found displeasing, however, or any real explanation of social realism.	. . .