Arts and Letters

I became intimate with Ben Shahn in the early thirties. I was almost fifteen years older, and we were no longer art students. An event had occurred some years earlier that identically influenced the course of our development as artists.

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, a socio-political event in no sense belonging to the field of art, had become a catalyst which could cleave brother from brother, much as has the war in Vietnam in recent years. In 1921 the two Italian immigrants were convicted of murder in an atmosphere of bitter prejudice against foreigners and Communists. They were electrocuted in 1927.

Ben was born in Russia in 1898. He came to the United States in 1906 and was naturalized as a citizen in 1918. The concurrence of these dates is important. The Sacco-Vanzetti affair must have had a decisive influence on Ben, a liberal young American art student. For the rest of his life he was an engagé, an artist activist. Perhaps only our young painters today can fully understand this emotional involvement.

From our first acquaintance and through the years Ben and I were often very close together—in our left-wing professional activities, in our common philosophy of art and what was the true meaning of the modern movement. There were other intervals when we drew apart on political or aesthetic considerations. But from our first meeting until the end we were quite united in the conviction that man and the visual world are the raw material of art, and that great art deals with man's struggle—and failure—to assert his own nobility.

Politically we were well to the left of center. Both of us a little proud, I fancy, of having at one time been on Hoover's F.B.I. secret file of questionable or undesirable citizens.

Once in the New Deal days of euphoria we conceived the idea of selling modern mural painting to the labor unions. Together we went to the headquarters of John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers of America. We were a little surprised and set back by their lack of sympathy. They felt that we were politically subversive and perhaps a little dangerous.

Sometimes Ben and I fell out and quarreled quite angrily. Neither of us was young in the late 1940s, when the ideological war between Trotskyites and Stalinists was tearing the Artists' Congress apart and painters were at each other's throats.

I remember once at an exhibition of sculpture at the Whitney Museum on West Eighth Street, Ben told me with vehemence that he was shocked to find me supporting the Trotskyites—Max Eastman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Dr. H. S. Muller, a Nobel Prize winner in science, being among them. And I, later in the evening, asked Ben's wife quite seriously if he were a Communist or a fellow traveler. We both agreed that it was "the parting of the ways." But it turned out to be no more than the youthful political ardor of two middle-aged men. Each of us should have known better.

A few years later we were friends again, and exchanging drawings and prints with each other. In the last letter I had from Ben he wrote me with a touch of wistfulness that "today it seems harder and harder for old friends to get together as they used to."

Ben and I were at one time invited by the Museum of Modern Art to participate in a discussion on the current trends of modernism. He spoke as its protagonist. I took the stand that much of its extreme experimentation was a disservice to what we both agreed was the most important revolution in the idiom of design since the Renaissance superseded the Gothic in the fifteenth century. We were, however, in such general agreement on fundamental issues that after our first encounter the Museum put an end to a further confrontation between us. I felt this was a pity. We both wanted a clarification of the issues that divided the art world. We both believed in a consensus rather than a polarization among the liberal-minded artists.

For all his emotional involvement, Ben had a lucid and well-trained mind. He was an intellectual. I remember a remark he made in our talk that impressed me. "Any great revolution," he said, "proceeds by trial and error, and with many false steps. We must not judge the fundamental achievements of modernism by its tentative idiosyncrasies."

I believe that a tribute to a fellow member of our organization should bring him to life as a human being. What I have written about Shahn is based on our personal relation over the years. In evaluating his importance as a creative artist one should strive for impersonal objectivity.

As a very young man Shahn's series of paintings on Sacco and Vanzetti was probably the most spontaneously emotional achievement of his career. But they only tentatively suggested the subsequent, more formalized idiom of his many murals and large canvasses.

In all the fields of the graphic arts—fine drawing, illustration, cartooning, lettering—he showed marked originality. Constantly experimenting, he gained a mastery of line; a line which he made his own, stripped to the bone, rigid, angular, nervous; wholly expressive of the great modern movement in the visual arts. He opened the way to other talented younger American artists. He secured a world recognition in his field.

In another sense, however, Shahn was wholly traditional in the path of Hogarth, Daumier, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz. That is, in his conviction that art is a vehicle of communication; and that it can be a vehement and angry protest.

For reasons that the art historian has not yet satisfactorily explained, the contemporary movement in the visual arts has more and more shrunk from the communication of ideas, from the involvement in human emotions and human problems, even from a recognition of the visual world.

Yet from the beginning of his career over forty-five years ago, Shahn always used his formalized and timely idiom as a vehicle to express the timeless emotions—anger, compassion, faith. He helped to free contemporary art from the straightjacket of dogmatism. In an age obsessed with the compulsion of innovation for innovation's sake, he was wholly traditional in his belief that art is nothing more than an imaginative, transcendent reaction to life.