In 1977, scarcely 10 years after the death of American artist Ben Shahn, Woody Allen cited him in a film to describe the kind of New York family — Jewish, old-time leftist — that would have a work of his in its home. The line got a laugh because to an audience acquainted with Shahn, the prototypical “socially concerned” artist, Allen’s remark made him the gift wrapping on a cliche.
The truth is, until the early 1960s Shahn’s art entered American homes of every type — as paintings, posters, record jackets and corporate advertisements. If not as lovable to the general public as Norman Rockwell’s illustrations, Shahn’s efforts were as easily recognizable, and for a long time designers considered his commercial pursuits among the most poetic examples of their kind.
The grittier aspect of Shahn’s work — his photographs — were little known. The Fogg Art Museum mounted a show of them in 1969, the year of his death, from more than 3,000 photographs given by his widow. But a book treating their full range, urban as well as rural, did not appear until 1975. And an exhibition presenting solely the pictures that Walker Evans called “pioneering documentary photography” comes to us only now, at the end of a four-city tour, at the David and Alfred Smart Museum.
“Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times” — both the show and its catalog — exhausts its subject. It has more than 100 photographs plus related paintings, drawings, studies (with a scale model) for an unrealized mural, two cameras of the type Shahn used, photographs by friends, and all manner of printed materials, from books to newspapers to even a (circa 1935) envelope from a camera store.
Shahn himself wavered on photography. Sometimes he said he saw no difference between photography and painting. At other times he insisted he photographed only for the sake of gathering motifs for paintings. Once, in a painting of churchgoers, he depicted himself as a photographer. To show he also regarded photography as a powerful instrument in politics, a friend photographed him photographing others in a protest. The exhibition successfully treats all these points of view.
“Art photography” was not for him, and this seemed a matter of temperament rather than resistance or rebellion. Shahn believed content was the most important thing in any picture. He was not particularly concerned about composition or print quality. Whenever he cropped or manipulated a print in the darkroom it was mainly to heighten the impression given by the content.
Shahn once said he photographed only three kinds of content: “aloneness; the impossibility to communicate with each other, which accounts for the aloneness; and thirdly, the sort of indestructible spirit of man to keep on going beyond the time when he thinks it would be impossible to arrive anywhere.” The last indicates a certain positivity, though judging from the exhibition he took few “positive” pictures of New York. Skyscrapers and what some photographers thought they suggested about the human spirit are absent from Shahn’s photographs. In the pictures, at least, his head was not in the clouds.
Almost everything on view can be characterized as “street photography.” Paul Strand, another man of the Left (but also an aesthete), took some of the earliest street photographs in America at the beginning of the 20th Century. Working with a large-format camera, he had a false lens affixed that allowed him to point in one direction but shoot in another, assuring candidness from (mostly) unsuspecting subjects.
Hand-held camera
Shahn also had a right-angle viewfinder, but a much smaller one because he — like his roommate Evans and Henri-Cartier Bresson, whom Shahn greatly admired — worked with a hand-held camera that allowed increased mobility and flexibility. He thus moved in crowds with some ease. But Shahn was not one to pre-visualize and wait for Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Evans said: “He was just like a child with the thing. He couldn’t stop shooting pictures.”
The exhibition is partly arranged according to locale: Greenwich Village and environs, Lower East Side, middle West Side/middle East Side. None of these areas permitted an idealized view of life. But apart from the occasional picture of a man with his head in his hands or a drunk passed out, the emotional conditions expressed by Shahn’s photographs are temperate, not heightened or sentimentalized, even in the instances where he creates short sequences of images that tend to get ever closer to the subjects.
The show clusters these pictures and occasionally presents them with Shahn paintings.
Head of the class
“Handball” is perhaps his greatest painting, and though it’s not present, four pictures of boys playing the game at the Houston Street Playground are. Shahn took them between 1932 and 1935. He created the painting in 1939. Here is clearly his practice of using photographs as “notes for future paintings.” One of the “notes” conveys virtually the same spatial sense as the painting. Such direct translation was not, alas, the norm.
The relationship of photographs to the painting “Blind Accordion Player” is more typical. The photographs, taken from several angles and degrees of closeness, are as straight as they can be. None of the formal relationships in the pictures leads the viewer to a condition of pathos. However, a semi-expressionist mode dominates the painting, inflating not only the hands, arms and face of the player but the emotional climate. The additional removal of the player to a landscape barren except for a blasted tree insures that the content of the picture becomes outsize, wheezily elegiac. Shahn took the photographs between 1932 and 1934. He created the painting in 1945.
Viewers who admire such histrionic humanism may feel that not enough “happens” in Shahn’s photographs. The ones of political protests issue no great clarion call. The ones of boys in a reformatory uncover no wrongs or plead innocence. Shahn admired Louis Hine’s photographs, but most of his own do not radiate that warmth. So it turns out he was serious about aloneness being his primary content. He catches great masses of people in his photographs, but of the ones on show, comparatively few depict connections between people.
Was it only the Depression that kept joy from entering the pictures? Certainly, for adults the Depression would have been enough. Yet Shahn’s photographs of children at play seldom show merriment. And there’s even trepidation in the face of his daughter as she stands before a shop window jammed with — no kidding — fat men’s underwear. Was this mood attributable to the times? Or was the photographer coolly but inexorably drawn to it?
The Shahn presented by this exhibition is, by and large, not a lifter of spirits. Nor is he as great a photographer as some of his compatriots. Yet the human landscape he depicts looks honest, and Shahn seems to have faced it with a fascinatingly modern mixture of curiosity and detachment.
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“Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times” will continue at the David and Alfred Smart Museum, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., through June 17.
