“I GUESS WHAT IT COMES DOWN TO IS THIS: I really don’t care that much about art. I’m interested in life, and only in art in so far as it enables me to express what I feel about life.” This line of thinking might sound commonplace today, and it has precedents in various avant-gardes running back to Courbet. But when Ben Shahn invoked “art into life” to his biographer in 1951, he volleyed it from a rather low trough. Abstraction was ascendant in American art, and Shahn, a social realist who had come to prominence in the hard-boiled 1930s, knew it.
Five years prior, the Museum of Modern Art had made Shahn the youngest artist thus far, at forty-nine, to receive its retrospective treatment. But midcareer surveys are sometimes polite eulogies. Today, 1947 is more associated with Jackson Pollock arriving at his signature drip formula. Pollock’s champion, Clement Greenberg, had always taken a dim view of Shahn, his campaign against “literary” figuration part and parcel with the New York Intellectuals’ broader devaluation of Popular Front culture. To that end, his review of S…
