One of the United States’ leading social realist artists, Ben Shahn gained prominence in the 1930s with a series of paintings that illustrated the notorious trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of committing armed robbery and murder in Massachusetts.  These paintings, which criticized the unfair treatment that the men received under the American legal system due to their immigrant status and political beliefs, epitomize the artist’s lifelong dedication to the union of politics and aesthetics.  Identifying himself as a “storyteller,” the artist treated themes of injustice in a realistic idiom, forging a modernist style of expressive color and flat, simple figurations that bordered on abstraction.  

Despite his formalist experimentation, Shahn remained true throughout his long career to the principles of a socially engaged art.  A central tenet of his approach was the ability of a work to communicate with its audience, especially those outside the art world, which necessitated a realistic depiction. While this philosophy of artistic production predominated during the New Deal era, it lost favor in the 1950s with the simultaneous ascendancy of socialist suppression and Abstract Expressionism, a movement that carried heavily individualistic and elitist implications. Confronted on one side by harassment from the government and on the other by accusations of conservatism from people within the art establishment, like the critic Clement Greenberg, Shahn stood his ground and publicly promoted a resurgence of humanism amongst artists.  

Displaying an acute sensitivity to human suffering and social injustice from an early age, Shahn’s firsthand experiences cemented these concerns.  Born in 1898 in present-day Lithuania, Shahn’s birthplace was part of a region known as the Pale of Settlement, a territory along the western border of the Russian Empire where Jews were forced to reside.  In addition to this religious discrimination, Shahn witnessed, at the age of five, his father’s banishment to Siberia for “revolutionary activities.”  To avoid imprisonment, the elder Shahn made his way to the United States via South Africa and settled in Brooklyn; the remainder of the family immigrated in 1906.  

Coming from a family of artisans, Shahn possessed a natural propensity for drawing and was apprenticed to a lithographer at the age of fourteen.  It was there, learning how to draft the letters of the alphabet flawlessly, that he first gained an appreciation for the formal qualities of text as an image, an interest that resurfaced in his paintings in the form of Hebrew script.  

Upon graduation, Shahn studied biology at New York University and City College, seeking to gain a better grasp of human anatomy, and then pursued a formal artistic education at the National Academy of Design.  In the mid-1920s, he spent several years traveling in Europe and North Africa, broadening his knowledge of art and its history.   

Returning to Brooklyn in 1929, Shahn had his first one-man show at The Downtown Gallery the following year.  During the early 1930s, he worked alongside Mexican artist Diego Rivera on the infamous Rockefeller Center mural, which was destroyed prior to completion because Rivera included the likeness of Vladimir Lenin in his depiction of the theme of labor and industry.  During the worst years of the Great Depression, Shahn found work through the Works Progress Administration and then at the Office of War Information during World War II.  In the late 1940s, he began teaching art, taking summer positions in Boston, Brooklyn, and Colorado.