Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn - Softcover

Chevlowe, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691004072 ISBN 13: 9780691004075

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Ben Shahn (1898-1969) has long been renowned for his Social Realist paintings of Depression-era America. Equally striking, however, are Shahn's extraordinary later works, which reveal a more introspective style as well as the evolution of a new allegorical and mythical pictorial language. This book combines beautiful reproductions of Shahn's art with essays by leading experts on his life and career to present a groundbreaking survey of his powerful and engaging mature style. The volume is published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition organized by The Jewish Museum, New York, to commemorate the centenary of Shahn's birth. The book contains more than one hundred illustrations, including thirty-two in color.


Susan Chevlowe opens the book by situating Shahn's art in the context of his long and remarkable career. She explains how Shahn became disillusioned with partisan ideologies of the 1930s, moving away in the 1940s and 1950s from critiques of specific social issues to explore universal human concerns and subjective experiences, including his own childhood memories. She also explores the increasing use of allegory, myth, and biblical imagery in Shahn's later work. Diana L. Linden examines the central importance of Shahn's secular Jewish identity in shaping his artistic responses to social and political issues, immigration, and war in murals created in the New Deal era. Stephen Polcari places Shahn in the context of his artistic contemporaries, showing how artists who worked in radically different styles--Regionalists, Expressionists, and Abstract Expressionists--were similarly engaged in a tense reexamination of the fate of humanity in the postwar period. Frances K. Pohl focuses on three of Shahn's most important paintings: Allegory (1948), Second Allegory (1953), and Third Allegory (1955). She argues that these works represent Shahn's search for a new symbolic language to express the personal and political upheavals of the post-Holocaust era marked by atomic weapons and the Cold War. The book also includes an illustrated chronology of Shahn's career, compiled by Howard Greenfeld, author of a major new biography of the artist.


This beautifully illustrated book will stimulate new critical and popular interest not only in the compelling late works but also in the entire career of a major American artist.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Chevlowe is Associate Curator at The Jewish Museum in New York. Diana L. Linden is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Pomona College. Frances K. Pohl is Associate Professor of Art History at Pomona College and author of Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate, 1947-1952, and Ben Shahn. Stephen Polcari is New York Director of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the author of Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience.

Reviews

With Social Realism out of favor with many critics, the artistic reputation of American artist Ben Shahn (1898-1968) has been in decline since his death. The recent interest in Shahn's life and work evidenced in the exhibition of his later pieces at the Jewish Museum in New York City and the recent biography by Howard Greenfeld (Ben Shahn: An Artist's Life, LJ 10/1/98) is refreshing. The four essays included in this catalog cover his life, his work on various New Deal art project murals, the relationship of his work to postwar American art, and the allegorical content of his disarmingly realist work. The color plates illustrating works in the exhibition are beautifully reproduced and provide a good introduction to Shahn's work and an excellent visual accompaniment to the Greenfeld biography. Recommended for collections with an interest in American art.AMartin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691004072
• ISBN 13: 9780691004075
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208