Martyrs And Heroes In Modern Times. - Review - book review

Afterimage, Nov, 2000 by Patricia Johnston, Joanne Lukitsh

Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

The Harvard University Art Museums

Cambridge, Massachusetts

February 5-April 30, 2000

Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times

by Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman and Jenna Webster

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2000

340 pp./$45.00 (sb)

The Phillips Collection

Washington, D.C.

June 10-August 27, 2000

The Grey Art Gallery

New York University

New York, New York

November 14, 2000-January 27, 2001

The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

April 19-June 17, 2001

Ben Shahn had a remarkable career as a photographer, painter, graphic artist and activist, whose sharp observations and critical analysis brought enormous insight into the life and politics of his era. However, until the last few years, most studies have relegated Shahn to a minor position in the history of American art. The exhibition Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times and its accompanying catalog focus almost exclusively on a short but formative period of Shahn's career, centered on the street photographs he made in New York City in the early to mid-1930s. The project contributes to new ongoing scholarly study of the long career of this complex political artist. Shahn's New York photographs were central to the development of his aesthetic and at the same time they provided him with a resource of urban images to which he returned again and again for his paintings and graphic artworks.

The curators' decision to focus exclusively on the New York photographs, made before his better-known works as a staff photographer for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) from 1935 to 1938, has several virtues. First, the exhibition publicizes a strength of the major personal archive of Shahn photographs, negatives and contact strips now in the collection (donated in 1970 by Bernarda Bryson Shahn, the photographer's widow) of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. Perhaps more significantly, this close examination of such a brief period in Shahn's career is a window into how urban life and left politics influenced the art of the 1 930s. Members of the artistic and intellectual community in New York City, including Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein, who included Shahn's work in the 1932 exhibition he curated for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), "Murals by American Painters and Photographers," promoted documentary photographs as an art form in their own r ight. Another part of the New York art world in which Shahn played a larger role was the Artists' Union, led by Stuart Davis. Long engaged with radical politics, Shahn had joined the Young People's Socialist League at age 16, and sharpened his political aesthetic while learning fresco painting technique as an assistant to Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center murals in 1933.

The first half of the exhibition "Ben Shahn's New York" is structured according to the different Manhattan neighborhoods--including the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Union Square and Midtown--that the artist observed in his unposed photographs, often taken with a right angle viewfinder in order to capture his subjects unaware. This format of organizing the exhibition through the theme of neighborhoods allows comparison of Shahn's images across time and media. Shahn returned to his New York images over and over, using them as the basis for drawings and paintings in succeeding decades. Displaying work that spans the decades within each section provides insights into the continuity and evolution of Shahn's ideas that would not emerge with a more conventional chronological structure.

Shahn's documentary photography in the early 1930s was distinctive for its sensitive treatment of urban poverty, race relations and Jewish and Italian immigrant cultures. Working neither for the government programs nor corporate publications, Shahn's independent production of documentary was somewhat anomalous for the era. He did, however, publish some of his street photography in left political journals, such as New Theatre and Art Front. Laura Katzman's thoughtful analysis in her first catalog essay, "Ben Shahn's New York: Scenes from the Living Theatre," employs on close study of composition and iconographic analysis of word fragments and signs, and the unplanned narrative resulting from the working method recorded on Shahn's contact strips. Katzman conveys Shahn's approach to his subjects by studying three or four consecutive images on 35 millimeter contact prints. Shahn wandered around New York City with specific themes in mind, such as homeless men lying on street grates, photographing subjects who wer e likely unaware that they were being photographed. Katzman argues for the social significance of the images as both witnesses to urban poverty and agents for change. She questions the now familiar concept of documentary photography as "double subjugation," that is, the person--already oppressed by poverty--becomes spectacle for subsequent viewers. Rather, Katzman believes that "Shahn's photographs of New York's underclass defy such reductive categorization; his subjects are neither victimized nor sanitized."