“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 Shahn’s survey tried to put a wedge between the artist and the company he kept: “Shahn has a genuine gift, and that he has not done more with it is perhaps the fault of the milieu in which he has worked, even more than his own.” But even former appreciators turned on him following the MoMA show. Henry McBride, who had once called Shahn “one of our half-dozen best” American painters, went so far as to call for Shahn’s deportation to the Soviet Union, red-baiting hand in formalist glove.
Such were the times. But despite Shahn’s vocal progressivism and its repercussions, he remained, according to the MoMA catalogue, “appreciated by both Left and Right; his work has been published in conservative magazines as often as in liberal; he has fulfilled commissions for labor unions and industrial corporations; his paintings are bought on completion by collectors of every political hue.” Legend has it that when Abby Rockefeller bought work from Shahn’s Sacco and Vanzetti series (1931–32), his seething debut at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, she said she wanted to buy the entire show so that “come the Revolution, I can fill the windows with these, and the House of Rockefeller may survive.”1 Shahn’s lifelong commercial success, both in painting and mass-media illustration, demonstrates the limits of understanding any moment of art’s messy totality through critical consensus alone. Young Warhol was a big fan, and corporate clients like CBS saw Andy as a low-rent substitute for Shahn without the political baggage. While Shahn’s influence on Warhol is usually pinned on their similar line work, it’s just as much in Shahn’s willingness to snub the highbrow by hustling mass markets.
His achievements notwithstanding, Shahn’s postwar writings and interviews find him entrenched, shadowboxing with political stagnation and abstraction’s efflorescence. The title of the Jewish Museum’s recent Shahn retrospective, On Nonconformity, comes from this period: It is the name of a talk from his 1956–57 Norton Lecture series at Harvard, later collected as The Shape of Content (1957), now an art school classic. “Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the pre-condition of good thinking and therefore growth and greatness in a people,” read the pull quote at the exhibition’s exit. “The degree of nonconformity present—and tolerated—in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.”
Shahn describes wanting to transcend the particulars of any one disaster and access a deeper current of tragedy—if he couldn’t countenance pure abstraction in painting, one abstraction he could pursue was collective consciousness, indulging some formal experimentation along the way.
Curated by leading Shahn scholar Laura Katzman, and traveling from the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, which in recent years has staged several remarkable exhibitions reassessing the 1930s, On Nonconformity repeatedly proclaimed Shahn’s “continued relevance.”2 In her introduction to the catalogue, Katzman describes its approach as “focusing on the artist’s commitment to social justice, through the lens of contemporary diversity and equity perspectives.” Read through this framework of contemporary institution-speak, Shahn’s essay can indeed come off as liberal bromide—and there would be precedent for that, as “On Nonconformity” ran not only as a cover story for The Atlantic but also in Amerika, the US State Department’s soft power rag distributed in the Soviet Union. The museum seems eager to be identified with Shahn’s position, understood as such. It also understands him to be “radical.” But what does its reading obscure about Shahn’s “relevance” today?
The show made sense of Shahn’s vast corpus by tracking it along a familiar chronology of twentieth-century American social movements: from class antagonism in the Great Depression to New Deal boosterism and war effort propagandizing to McCarthyite persecution and antinuclear campaigns to the civil rights movement and “decolonization” (their word) and concluding with a turn to “spirituality and identity.” Shahn, who was born on the eve of the century in what is now Lithuania, and whose family migrated to New York when he was a small child, took part in all of it, and in his work he bore witness to each moment. Take the monumental tempera panel which opened the show, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Reprising the gouache cycle that Abby Rockefeller so coveted, Shahn made it for MoMA’s 1932 exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers. The Italian anarchist duo appear at bottom, heads poking out of their coffins; above them stand three men, two in suits and one in professors’ robes. They are the Lowell Committee: three legal experts, including the sitting presidents of Harvard and MIT, who were assembled in 1927 to review the fairness of the two men’s trial, in which the state accused them of robbing and murdering a factory paymaster. They concluded that the trial was fair, ratifying the defendants’ execution. Behind the committee stands the courthouse and a portrait of the presiding judge under oath. The aggressive linearity of the backdrop (even the right angle of the Judge’s arm) contrasts a rigid institution with the flawed men before it, in whom no line is straight: Eyes run off-center, mouths droop to one side. Two of them hold up limp flowers. For an image of villains, their expressions are oddly illegible. They stare off to the distance, bored at best, neither relishing nor lamenting their part in the fate of the dead men before them.
The painting was nearly pulled from the MoMA show. Trustees were worried about offending the judge and surviving members of the committee, whom they knew socially and perceived as potential donors. One trustee even offered to buy the panel for a high price ahead of the show, as a way of preempting its display. Shahn declined the kill fee, and The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti was ultimately displayed after fellow exhibiting artists threatened to withdraw from the show in solidarity.
Shahn’s postwar writings and interviews find him entrenched, shadowboxing with political stagnation and abstraction’s efflorescence.
In partisan image-making, one makes one’s enemies ugly, aligning appearance to purported essence. And while Shahn certainly makes the Lowell Committee lumpy and strange, that’s how he portrayed nearly everyone, as his portraits of Sacco and Vanzetti in life attest: With Shahn’s brush, the martyrs are hardly the virile hunks of Soviet kitsch; their gazes are just as inscrutable as the committee’s, their qualities unsettled, shifting from picture to picture. Two Witnesses (1932), from Shahn’s follow-up series telling the story of Tom Mooney, another labor cause célèbre, who had been accused of (and later pardoned for) bombing a pro-war parade in San Francisco, shows two women with similarly gnomic stares. Are they friends or foes? A nearby vitrine clarified with a clipping from Shahn’s papers of the photograph he worked from, found in a Comintern front pamphlet: “Two Blood-Hunting Vultures. Mellie Edeau and Sadie Edeau, Self-Confessed Perjurers.”
The pamphlet’s approach is textbook propaganda. Shahn’s is not: His indignation is tempered by ambivalence. In this way, his method doesn’t quite gel with stereotypes about social realism or American radicalism in the 1930s. Shahn’s people aren’t Manichaean, because at bottom, they are all made up of the same stuff. Nicola Sacco and the Harvard president alike are figured as queasy, fragile flesh. Like in a medieval tableau, it is their attributes—the clothes they wear, the objects they bear—and their chance placement within the social composition that steer their lot in this world. The key to Shahn’s realism was often the telling sartorial detail: “There’s a difference,” he said, “in the way a twelve-dollar coat wrinkles from the way a seventy-five-dollar coat wrinkles, and that has to be right.”
WERE SHAHN’S AIMS AND MEANS UNCHANGED from 1931 to 1957? To take the “Nonconformity” essay as a thesis of the artist’s entire career, rather than something penned in the depths of McCarthyism, would blunt the more radical edges of Shahn’s project. It would fumble the chance to glimpse the alterity of that early moment, and the social and aesthetic ideals toward which young Shahn and his circles were oriented. In fact, Shahn warns against such revisionism in “On Nonconformity” itself: “While artists try to make their nonconformity as clear and unmistakable as possible, one of the challenging tasks of criticism seems to be to smooth over such nonconformity, and to make it appear that this or that artist was a very model of propriety.”
While Shahn pins it on criticism, the “smoothing over” of nonconformity—or as we might call it today, the absorption of critique—nowadays falls more to museums and historians. Gestures of protest have long been incorporated into cultural production. Maybe they’re even a “model of propriety,” so long as the protest remains merely gestural, and doesn’t touch certain topics. Recently, the third rail has been Palestine: In the US, Artforum imploded over an open letter calling for a ceasefire, with collectors privately pressuring artists to withdraw their signatures. The Whitney Independent Study Program, a hallowed incubator of critical practices since 1968, is “on pause” and unstaffed for similar reasons. Palestinian artist Samia Halaby had her 2024 retrospective abruptly canceled, with the museum director citing staff concerns over the eighty-seven-year-old artist’s social media activity; and the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center incurred a wave of staff resignations and speaker withdrawals after “postponing” a talk by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who had signed an open letter in the London Review of Books. All the while, artists and activists have been arrested and assaulted for expressing their “nonconformity” to such clampdowns on thought and action, all across the Global North.3
Shahn’s universalism, loaded as that term is, is an attempt to forge solidarity across lines of difference, rather than silo oneself in one’s own experience. This is one definition of comrade.
There was a work in On Nonconformity that effectively demanded I write about the show in relation to how institutions smother the “radical” practices they claim to endorse. Produced while Shahn was working for the US Office of War Information (OWI), We Fight for a Free World! (ca. 1942) is a staggering proposal for an unrealized series of posters (few of his government designs were approved) advancing the fight against fascism. It depicts five designs on a brick wall, each decrying an “enemy method” of the Nazis: Suppression, Starvation, Slavery, Torture, and Murder. The work’s title is graffitied below them. Shahn paired each “method” with a preexisting artwork by a different social realist: Edward Millman (Suppression), Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Torture), Bernard Perlin (Murder), Shahn himself (Slavery), and, most achingly, Käthe Kollwitz for Starvation, making use of her famous poster Deutschlands kinder hungern! (ca. 1923), which depicts desperate children holding up empty bowls.4 The wall label for We Fight for a Free World!, in keeping with the exhibition as a whole, proclaimed its “urgent relevance to twenty-first-century art of resistance.” But it didn’t say how that “relevance” might be recognized, or where the “art of resistance” might be most “urgent.”
By my fourth visit to the exhibition, starvation in Gaza was regularly killing children, and the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in coordination with its backers in the US and Israeli governments, had systematized the daily massacres at its food distribution sites, delivering the message to Gazans that “trying to get food is a death sentence.”5 The footage we have from these sites is full of desperate children holding up empty bowls. It was captured by journalists, whom the IDF systematically targets (to Starvation add Suppression, Murder).
The relevance of Shahn’s painting is viscerally clear, but it works against the priorities of the hosting museum, whose leadership, as with most American institutions, is imbricated in the US-Israel “special relationship.” The museum’s director, James S. Snyder, started his job in August 2023 after twenty-two years as director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Following the money of the trustees quickly leads to a familiar alphabet soup of pro-Israel organizations: AIPAC, ADL, UJA, DMFI, IDF.6 By contrast, and to its credit, the exhibition’s originating institution, the Reina Sofia, has vocally aligned itself with the Palestinian cause, and it runs an ongoing programming series calling for “a strong public discourse that speaks out for an end to the Palestinian genocide.” The series is co-organized with the newly opened Embassy of the State of Palestine in Madrid, which houses a reproduction of the museum’s crown jewel, Picasso’s Guernica (1937), painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag. The Reina Sofia’s approach sounds closer to Shahn, who agitated for the Spanish Republic as an editor of Art Front and photographer of pro-Republic protests in the thirties and who signed on to countless progressive causes until his death in 1969.
Gestures of protest have long been incorporated into cultural production. Maybe they’re even a “model of propriety,” so long as the protest remains merely gestural, and doesn’t touch certain topics.
Even though it’s not in their collection, We Fight for a Free World! previously lent its title to another exhibition at the Jewish Museum, curated by contemporary pop-conceptualist Jonathan Horowitz, in 2020–21.7 The artist was invited by the museum to organize a show about the resurgence of antisemitism in the US. He broadened the exhibition’s scope to address other oppressions, represented by artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Kara Walker, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. One of Horowitz’s own works in that show, a pair of facing mirrors reading YOUR LAND and MY LAND, according to its wall label, problematizes the notion of land ownership: “Claiming land to be either ‘yours’ or ‘mine’ is inevitably fraught by history.” Though that exhibition focused on the United States, suggesting a both-sidesy comment on Manifest Destiny, the artist has regularly prevaricated around the Middle East as well: Another work in that show (What Am I? Who Are We?, 2020) reproduces a 1946 drawing by ardent Zionist propagandist Arthur Szyk and pairs it, again, with an etched mirror, splitting across the two panels two famous lines attributed to Rabbi Hillel (“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? / If I am only for myself, what am I?”). Elsewhere, he has shown an Israeli flag sewn onto a Palestinian flag, recto-verso; while his 2014 screenprint Imagine: there’s no Israel/there’s no Palestine reduces the conflict to the anodyne politics of John Lennon.
More recent programming has focused preponderantly on pro-Israel narratives. In December 2023 the museum exhibited a cloying group of watercolors depicting October 7 and its aftermath, explicitly referencing Picasso’s Guernica while depicting zero Palestinians.8 Last year, the institution acquired (M)otherland (2024), US-born artist Ruth Patir’s video installation for the Israeli Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where it had been installed but never publicly opened, due to public protest. Originally titled The Fertility Pavilion, the work, according to the museum’s press release, reflects “on the complex intersection of gender, motherhood, and the tensions surrounding fertility and reproductive rights in today’s world,” while chalking up Israeli war crimes to an excess of toxic masculinity. At the time, Patir stated she would reopen the Venice pavilion “when a ceasefire and a hostage release agreement is reached.” While the Jewish Museum hasn’t announced any plans to exhibit the work, the lack of a ceasefire didn’t stop her from exhibiting it in Tel Aviv last March. If Horowitz’s hedging is buffoonish, Patir’s is artful, and more in step with the museum’s messaging apparatus: a desultory rhetoric of concern that diverts critique into a vaguely humanistic (and in Patir’s case, feminist) pseudoprogressivism.
Shahn’s art threatened trustees at MoMA in 1932. Works like We Fight for a Free World! could still threaten trustees today, if its critique’s full force were felt. If we are tasked with bringing Shahn’s work into the present, and if this painting confronts us with “enemy methods,” we have to ask what makes up the “enemy” now and who constitutes the “we” that fights.
SHAHN’S NUMEROUS MURALS for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) are an important part of his legacy only briefly touched on in the show. Murals being murals, they always present a challenge for exhibition-making, forcing a reliance on preparatory studies—though at Reina Sofia there were several more of them. At the Jewish Museum, his New Deal masterwork in Washington, DC, The Meaning of Social Security (1942), was represented by a sunny fragment of a proud male farmworker harvesting wheat. But in DC, Shahn also has a panel that depicts suffering: It shows weary and incredulous children, some on crutches, all in dirty smocks, standing before an alienating tangle of infrastructure and sullen adults. Shahn’s commitment to portraying the hardships that necessitate reform was unusual in the WPA’s mural program, which generally promoted images of abundance, prosperity, and civic virtue. In fact, this strategy cost him commissions, including one for the Rikers Island penitentiary, newly constructed in 1935, where he intended to underscore the prison’s ostensibly reformist aspirations (vocational training, nutritious meals) by contrasting them with “unenlightened” penal techniques (public flogging, chain gangs) on opposing walls approaching the Rikers chapel. When city officials scrapped the plan, they cited concern about its “bad psychological effect” upon inmates.
Shahn applied his binary approach in a more playful register as well, in a mural proposal for the Central Park Casino: an Olmsted-era restaurant that Mayor Jimmy Walker converted into a ritzy nightclub in 1929, with interiors by Joseph Urban (also responsible for Hearst Tower and the original décor of Mar-a-Lago). It was demolished by Robert Moses and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1936. Had they been realized, Shahn’s Casino murals would have celebrated the repeal of Prohibition, only passed a year prior, by memorializing bootleggers, speakeasys, and police raids. Two key walls would have recast the battle of the progressive future against the regressive past as a game of boys versus girls: an antiprohibitionist parade made up of jolly men holding “Beer for Taxation” signs facing down the killjoy ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Formally, these are among Shahn’s richest mural studies. They also depict Depression-era New York’s goings-on beyond Shahn’s usual proletarian motifs. But they were absent from the New York version of the show.
Sometimes Old Left ideas don’t feel so old.
Last March, I tried to visit the DC mural in what was originally the Social Security Administration Building, now the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, or as preservationists call it, “the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” My outreach to the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for the federal art collection, received two replies from staffers’ personal email accounts informing me that the entire department had gotten DOGE’d, mural docents included, so tours were not happening. More alarmingly, this meant every artwork in federal possession (more than 26,000 total, including those in courthouses and most outdoor sculptures on federal sites) suddenly lost custodianship. Conservators were stuck with government property in their studios, with nobody to contact about returning the work or receiving payment. The White House is eager to sell the Cohen building as part of a portfolio of other “noncore” federal properties, and while the building is in the National Register of Historic Places, that designation doesn’t prevent demolition or offer protection for decorative elements like murals. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought offered a predictable rationale: “The OMB encourages the disposition of the identified assets in a manner that maximizes the return to the taxpayer.”9
Shahn viewed Social Security as a solution to what he had come to see as his primary theme: “the problem of human insecurity.” Now, not only are his DC murals in jeopardy, but the entire program that inspired them is on the chopping block. The Trump administration’s stance on this issue was summed up by its erstwhile nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, another Heritage Foundation stooge, who called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme that was foisted on the American people by the Democrats in the 1930s” in need of “sunsetting.” Shahn’s optimism for the then-dawning American century is part of his work’s charm, and from what I can see in pictures, the DC murals have it in spades. But as the remaining achievements of the New Deal, artistic and legislative, are being systematically dismantled, that optimism doesn’t only feel quaint—it feels sadistically ironic.
IN PICTURING THE EXPERIENCE OF INSECURITY, Shahn’s murals connect to the other art-historically significant part of the New Deal: the documentary photos of the Resettlement Administration, which in 1937 became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Shahn made his mark here too, alongside Walker Evans (his former studiomate), Dorothea Lange, and the rest; his photographs were amply represented in the exhibition. The FSA’s mission differed from the WPA’s: It had to demonstrate the need for reform programs, so its images tended to expose destitution rather than immortalize triumph. (Later, once some of those programs were implemented, the emphasis shifted from suffering to success, and the photos started looking more like the murals.) Shahn’s early contributions were somewhat renegade, since he was an “unofficial, part-time member” of the group who didn’t receive regular instructions for shoots.10 This might explain why he photographed strikes when FSA directives generally discouraged them, preferring pious victims in the mold of Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936).11
Outside of his government work, Shahn also extensively photographed Manhattan, documenting tenement street scenes in moments of beguiling vacancy. For Shahn, these photographs were primarily source material for future paintings, such as Handball (1939), which reworks a snapshot of a recreation court on East Houston Street, circa 1932–35, adding a meticulous block of movie theater posters in the distance (Loew’s Delancey, RKO Apollo). Even Greenberg had to acknowledge this painting, however backhandedly, and he recognized the debt it owed to photography, which, “with its sudden telescoping of planes, its abrupt leaps from solid foreground to flat distance … gave him the formula which remains responsible for most of the successful pictures he has painted since then.” The exhibition consistently marked this passage from photographic reference to painterly rendering, which has also been an important fixture of Katzman’s scholarship on Shahn.
In general, Shahn’s photographs are fascinating for what they depict, whether the long burlap sacks dragging behind Black women sharecroppers in Arkansas cotton fields or the careful hand-lettered signage in English and Yiddish on Lower East Side shop windows—or a poster advertising the Palestine Theatre at 11 Clinton Street, shot twelve years before the founding of the state of Israel, surfacing the very history that those in power would rather stay forgotten. As formal objects on the gallery wall, they are not always so compelling. The prints themselves are poor, in keeping with the FSA’s emphasis on mass dissemination over pictorial fineness. They don’t always transcend Shahn’s intent for them as raw material, whether for painting or propaganda. While Evans forced an exactitude onto his messy subjects, which gave his images much of their power, Shahn let snapshots be snapshots and only sometimes struck gold. En masse in the show, they felt puffed up, taking more than their share of the wall space.
I bring up wall space because of an unfortunate fact of the exhibition: Comparing the catalogue and exhibition checklists, it seems the Jewish Museum’s version was missing more than a third of the works on view at the Reina Sofia—around 115 of 290—and added only a few. Apparently this is because the show wasn’t planned to travel to New York until after it proved to be such a hit in Madrid. While the curators can’t be blamed for the difficulty of extending museum loans on short notice, it does mean the catalogue tells a more fleshed out and richly illustrated story than the New York rendition of the show did. It also helps explain why this version had a certain “greatest hits” quality.
Whatever the ratio of decision to happenstance, the pieces retained in New York were generally those that most directly supported the show’s social justice thesis (a late lithograph of Gandhi, for instance), and much of what was lost were works that are more oblique in their activism. Shahn’s “Sunday Paintings,” well represented in the catalogue, depict working people on their day off—not toiling masses, but idling individuals with some dignity. The harmonica player in Pretty Girl Milking the Cow (1940), named for the folk tune he’s presumably playing; a woman wearing a folded newspaper hat on a park bench (Nearly Everyone Reads the Bulletin, 1946); a man sitting outside of a restaurant that’s covered in polka dots (Seurat’s Lunch, ca. 1939): All alleviate the browbeating of Shahn’s more programmatic work without inviting escapism. As another folk song goes, “Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.” Sometimes, gravity and levity pair. In a great addition to the New York show, Contemporary American Sculpture (1940), Shahn paints a gallery of modernist statuary actually exhibited at that year’s Whitney Annual, appending his own paintings of human strife to the walls. Nodding back to John Heartfield’s photomontages and anticipating Martha Rosler’s Vietnam protest collages, the image is both cheeky and grave, a New Yorker cartoon pulled to the left.
ONE SURPRISING ABSENCE in the New York show is Allegory (1948), a frequently cited and reproduced work whose central figure, a flaming beast with its mouth agape, appears on the cover of The Shape of Content. In the book, Shahn spends an entire lecture reconstructing the painting’s formation. For him, and for art historians, Allegory signifies a major pivot: a move beyond social document to the “universal,” which today reads like an attempt to update his practice for postwar taste.12 Shahn describes wanting to transcend the particulars of any one disaster and access a deeper current of tragedy—if he couldn’t countenance pure abstraction in painting, one abstraction he could pursue was collective consciousness, indulging some formal experimentation along the way. Without Allegory, this turn arrived with a thud as the galleries swerved from gorgeous tableaux of postwar Europe, mothers mourning and children playing amid rubble, to brushily executed paintings of harlequins and existentialists.
Allegory is important enough for the work to have been reproduced as a thumbnail in a vitrine, next to one of its source images: a military-classified photo showing a pile of dead children in Greece, where approximately 90 percent of the country’s Jewish population was murdered. Shahn encountered this photograph through his work at OWI and brought it into Allegory, laying the children beneath his beast. While the source photo inarguably ties the painting to the Holocaust, the label took it one step further:
The painting may allude to the founding of the state of Israel, given that it was made in 1948, the year of Israel’s creation. The beast also resembles the mythological she-wolf who suckled the human twins Romulus and Remus, later the fathers of Rome.
This is curious, because Israel goes unmentioned in Shahn’s lecture on Allegory.13 According to him, it began with an illustration commission for a Harper’s article about James Hickman, a Black former sharecropper who had moved to Chicago. When Hickman’s four youngest children died in an apartment fire there, he shot his landlord, whom he believed was responsible for the blaze. At the Reina Sofia, all sixteen original drawings for the Harper’s piece were shown; none of them were in the New York exhibition.
In his lecture, Shahn describes the “enormity” of his identification with Hickman: a shared “primitive terror” subtending their respective fears of fire, the trauma of poverty, and experiences of racial injustice. He writes about his own memories of fire—the first in Lithuania, witnessing a fire that consumed his grandfather’s shtetl, Vilkomir, and later, his family’s apartment fire in Williamsburg, which permanently scarred his father’s face and hands. He recounts struggling to find new pictorial means to convey this arterial sympathy with Hickman’s case, setting the stage for Allegory. Shahn’s universalism, loaded as that term is, is an attempt to forge solidarity across lines of difference, rather than silo oneself in one’s own experience. This is one definition of comrade.14
There’s another problem with the exhibition text’s tentative interpretation of Allegory, which aligns the foundational imagery of Rome with the national emergence of Israel. In The Shape of Content, Shahn writes:
I had always found disconcerting the familiar sculpture of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the She-Wolf. It had irritated me immensely, and was a symbol that I abhorred. Now I found that, whether by coincidence or not I am unable to say, the stance of my imaginary beast was just that of the great Roman wolf, and that the children under its belly might almost be a realization of my vague fears that, instead of suckling the children, the wolf would most certainly destroy them.
If this is indeed an allegory of state formation, it hardly seems like a triumphant one. And while it’s possible that the beast’s mane may have called to the curators’ minds the Lion of Judah, and with it a symbolic pathway to modern-day Israel, Shahn discourages this reading as well. Though the head, he concedes, may be “lion-like,” it is emphatically “still not a lion.” The children piled under the creature, “in their playclothes of 1908,” are anchored in Shahn’s memory, some forty years before Israel’s founding: They “are not Roman, nor are they the children of the Hickman fire; they resemble much more closely my own brothers and sisters.” If their deaths were invoked by some to justify the state’s establishment, Shahn seems insistent to create some distance between his own experience and that conclusion.
Shahn’s beast also appeared on a cover of Jewish Life, precursor to Jewish Currents, in November 1948.15 The opening editorial pits itself against Zionist culture and valorizes the diaspora. While Shahn isn’t on the masthead, those who were chose his beast to be the beacon of their vehemently anti-Zionist beliefs in the wake of Israel’s founding:
The insistence of the leadership of the Zionist movement on Zionising American Jewish life is inimical to American Jewish creativity and survival. It negates the ability of the American Jewish community to be creative in its own right and is, despite verbal protestations to the contrary, the concept of Shilat Hagalut, the negation of all Jewish communities outside of Israel. It perpetuates the process of imbuing American Jews with a sense of inferiority and promotes a philosophy of culture and education based on this negation. It deprives the American Jewish community of a long, rich and militant Yiddish tradition, which is the very heart of whatever Jewish creativity has been meaningful in Jewish life to date in America. And it instils [sic] a political philosophy of aloneness which can only sunder the Jewish community from its necessary allies, without whom that community must sink into a sterile existence.
This editorial feels almost as if it could have been written today. Sometimes Old Left ideas don’t feel so old. If that tradition has long felt buried—written off as naïve, reductive, or simply misaligned with contemporary realities—passages like this one show the potential in its exhumation.
By positioning “Spirituality and Identity” as its final section, the otherwise chronological show risks repeating the misconception that Shahn was not interested in his Jewishness until late in life. But the strongest works in that section, his illuminated pages for the Haggadah, are from 1931—the year he began Sacco and Vanzetti.
Shahn himself never visited Israel, repeat invitations notwithstanding. In the 1960s he did some commercial work for government-owned corporations, including a medal for El Al Airlines and two weirdly somber mosaics for the nightclub on the SS Shalom, a short-lived luxury cruise liner operated by the Israeli shipping company ZIM. Apart from a footnote supplying the above information, the state receives only passing mention in the catalogue. The same note tells us that “Shahn’s relationship to Israel is complex” and “beyond the scope of this text.”
Chasing after the historical specificity of Shahn’s radicalism, one mostly runs into not Zionism but its long-lost foil, Bundism: a secular, integrationist tradition of Jewish socialism that has been eagerly rediscovered in recent years by young Jews searching for an alternative tradition.16 Originating in Shahn’s native Lithuania and founded in 1897 (the same year as the World Zionist Organization), the Jewish Labor Bund upheld Yiddish as a linguistic heritage that, if cultivated, could be as rich as Hebrew; emphasized class struggle over ethnic nationalism; and foregrounded doikayt, or “hereness,” to valorize Jewish rights throughout the diaspora, rejecting the argument for return. While Shahn’s father, regularly cited as the fount of Shahn’s politics, is always described as a Lithuanian “socialist” or “anti-czarist,” I have found only one scholar who briefly ties the Shahns to Bundism. But the fact that his family fled west after the failed 1905 revolution tracks with Bundist experience.
Shahn grew up in a milieu populated by Bundists. Labor leaders of the Lower East Side, including Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky, started out in the movement; Hillman led the Bund’s first May Day parade in Kovno, Shahn’s birthplace, in 1904.17 Morgen Freiheit, the Yiddish Communist newspaper that published Jewish Life, was deeply Bundist. Some commentators have given Shahn flack for resenting or suppressing his Jewish identity for much of his career, with one ascribing it to his “fear of being labeled parochial.” But when read in light of Bundism’s resurgence and the crumbling consensus on Israel, it seems more likely that his conception of Judaism was simply a contrary one, informed by a tradition that has long been repressed in public memory. By positioning “Spirituality and Identity” as its final section, the otherwise chronological show risks repeating the misconception that Shahn was not interested in his Jewishness until late in life. But the strongest works in that section, his illuminated pages for the Haggadah, are from 1931—the year he began Sacco and Vanzetti.
SHAHN’S INCLINATION TOWARD Bundist hereness can also be felt in his first mural, completed in 1938 for an experimental community called Jersey Homesteads (now known as Roosevelt, New Jersey). He coauthored it with Bernarda Bryson, his lifelong partner, who unlike Shahn was an open member of the Communist Party USA. A product of the New Deal, Jersey Homesteads was one of a hundred or so cooperative villages established nationwide by the Resettlement Administration and other government agencies. Most were for sharecroppers, but this one was unique in that it was specifically for Lower East Side tradespeople affiliated with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), whose membership was almost entirely Jewish. The town plan and homes were designed in a budget Bauhaus style by Alfred Kastner and his then-unknown assistant, Louis Kahn. After finishing the mural, Shahn moved to the town and lived there to the end of his life.
Ben and Bernarda Shahn House and Studio. Lauren Martin
The vision of a kibbutz in New Jersey initially belonged to Benjamin Brown, a developer and eager Zionist with a utopian streak. For him and other Jersey Homesteads founders, it was important to demonstrate that Jews could work the land since they had so often been deprived of their own land on which to do so. The town would operate as one big cooperative: Citizens would spend half the year raising crops and half the year running their own garment factory. The plan failed almost immediately, and the town settled into a typical suburb. Regardless, deeply conservative neighboring towns feared and resented this “New Jersey Soviet,” its Jewish residents, and the activist government that backed it. Internally, ILGWU president David Dubinsky was also wary of the project, which to him resembled the union-busting tactic of the “runaway shop”: establishing a factory outside of the city to undercut urban manufacturing and limit union oversight.
Jersey Homesteads dramatizes the experience of Jewish migration from Europe to the United States, structured episodically. Starting at left with hardships in Europe (including what’s credited as the only explicit depiction of a Nazi in all of the WPA), the Jewish masses pass through Ellis Island, led by Homestead booster Albert Einstein, Shahn’s mother, and fellow painter Raphael Soyer. In the city, they work in modern factories and live in tenements. They learn about trade unionism, listen to a speech by CIO titan John L. Lewis in front of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and take night classes on labor history (for the classroom’s blackboard diagram, Shahn was directed to tamp down his view that the insurgent CIO, which included the ILGWU, was the successor to the more conservative AFL, and instead represent the two unions as parallel branches). Passing through the porticos of several ILGWU buildings, the immigrants arrive at Jersey Homesteads: The factory, orchards, and homes appear behind the town’s blueprint, presided over by Kastner and various civic leaders. The mural is stunning.18 Its density of faces and dramatic perspectival shifts are consciously indebted to Diego Rivera, whom Shahn had assisted on his ill-fated Rockefeller Center fresco. The building is still a public elementary school, and it has accumulated an unusual art collection, all displayed around the Shahn. The collection includes other WPA-commissioned sculptures, pieces gifted by artists who made the pilgrimage to the town, and on the neighboring wall another mural, painted by schoolchildren. It consists of a green dragon whose fire breath is also a word bubble: “I was made by the 1st grade.” Roosevelt is worth the trip, too. Residents started modifying Kastner’s boxy houses almost immediately, and many of them are still standing—including Shahn’s, which is currently abandoned, his backyard studio disappearing into an overgrowth of shrubs.
From the study to the final mural, Shahn diplomatically steered the project away from Zionist presumptions and rooted it in the here and now of Jewish American experience—a savvy act of nonconformity.
In an addition to the New York exhibition, Jersey Homesteads was represented by an early study of the first panel—the bad old days. While much stayed the same in the finished picture, some scenes got swapped out: The study begins with a pogrom and two boys in coffins; in Roosevelt, the pogrom has disappeared, and the boys have transformed into Sacco and Vanzetti, which Shahn intended as a gesture toward interlocking struggles. In the study there is also a Passover seder, and behind it a grayscale representation (a photograph?) of the Wailing Wall. In Roosevelt, this scene is replaced with a New York park where workers are napping on a warm day. The wall label mentions this last change but doesn’t explore its implications.
While Kastner’s earliest pitch for the mural included immigration to Palestine as a counterpoint to the Homesteads, Shahn personally resisted this idea. The artist’s final “script” for the piece carefully redirects to make an argument for hereness. In it, he calls the study’s depiction of Jerusalem “a fragment of a dream of return,” a “nostalgic prayer,” an understandable reaction to generations of persecution and exclusion from civic life. He ascribes it to the older generation. The new generations, on the other hand, are “fully assimilated into their surroundings. They take part in the life of their country.” Shahn describes another unrealized scene, not pictured in the study, with a young man standing before a forking path. One way leads to the “Holy Land, toward Tel Aviv, and the new Jewish settlements in Palestine. He looks longingly—shall he return to the homeland?” He declines: “He seems rooted to the ground. He is an American, his children are Americans. His trade, and all his aspirations are oriented with America.”
The second path leads to Jersey Homesteads. This path fulfills communitarian ideals, but it’s also “completely integrated” into the man’s real situation, enabling him to “realistically and logically [practice] his trade.” From the study to the final mural, Shahn diplomatically steered the project away from Zionist presumptions and rooted it in the here and now of Jewish American experience—a savvy act of nonconformity. In the decades since, Western consensus has aligned with a state that has been highly successful in framing itself as essential, even identical, to Jewish identity. Shahn saw things through another frame, alive to other possibilities, before that consensus was wrought. Now, that consensus is shifting. Ben Shahn is indeed relevant, but as we revisit him, his nonconformity should not be smoothed over. It should be made, in his words, as clear and unmistakable as possible.