Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969 )

Born in Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States in 1906 with his parents, who settled in Brooklyn. Shahn came from a family of Jewish Lithuanian craftsmen. His father was a wood worker and his mother a potter. Ever since childhood Shahn had enjoyed drawing and lettering and wanted to become an artist. This interest led to an apprenticeship, at the age of fourteen, at a Manhattan lithography shop; he worked there from 1913 to 1917 while going to high school at night. The calligraphic skills he acquired would be noticeable in his future art work.

In 1916, Shahn enrolled in a life drawing class at the Art Students League of New York, and soon after that, in 1919, he enrolled at New York University. At NYU he studied biology, an interest acquired in a class he took in high school. Shahn’s hard work and mental discipline won him three consecutive summer scholarships at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Deciding that biology was not for him, Shahn went back to his goal of becoming an artist and transferred to City College in 1921. The following year he enrolled at the National Academy of Design.

As a result of his childhood years in a ghetto, Shahn developed a keen sense of observation. He witnessed many of the social problems of Americans in his era. Being Jewish, he also experienced some of these hardships himself. As a result, he became one of the most famous Social Realist painters in America. Although his primary field was painting, he also dabbled in photography and printmaking. (MMB)

Mural for Community Center, Jersey Homesteads

Detail of mural (left section), 1937-38, fresco, 12 x 45 feet overall, Community Center, Jersey Homesteads, Roosevelt

Detail of mural (right section), 1937-38, fresco, 12 x 45 feet overall, Community Center, Jersey Homesteads, Roosevelt

Ben Shahn's mural for the community center at Jersey Homesteads, Roosevelt, is a fresco - a painting done on fresh, moist plaster with pigments dissolved in water. It depicts the life of Jewish immigrants coming to America in the 1930s.

Shahn was an American Social Realist painter. His paintings often focused specifically on social problems and the hardships of everyday life. His work was influenced by Diego Rivera, a famous Mexican Social Realist, who taught him how to fresco while working on a mural for Rockefeller Center in New York City. The Homestead painting was Shahn’s first completed mural.

After 1930 many of Shahn’s paintings depicted subjects of moral outrage and protest. The most famous is his “Sacco and Vanzetti” series from 1931. The figures in those paintings appear largely simplified and two dimensional. Shahn depended greatly on the use of line.

Shahn was commissioned to paint this mural for Jersey Homesteads’ community center in 1936. It is located in one of the elementary schools in the development. It is thought that the story structure of the mural is based on a Jewish sacred text, the Haggadah: a narrative of slavery, deliverance, and redemption. The mural, just like the Haggadah, is broken down into three main areas.

The Jersey Homesteads mural illustrates the struggle of a Jewish immigrant coming to America. The story starts in Germany and ends in America. At the beginning of the mural, on the far left side, there are German soldiers and images of Ellis Island. In the center are immigrants coming over the bridge (shown here). One of the immigrants is Albert Einstein, a friend of Shahn’s who also lived in Jersey Homesteads for a time. At the center right, factory workers are pictured, illustrating the poor jobs and working conditions many of them had. Above this are people sleeping outside because of the dreadful ventilation in their tenement homes. This too shows the hardships many people went through when coming to America. The narrative ends in American, shown at the far right side, with a table surrounded by men planning a project. (MMB)

References:

Howard Greenfeld, Ben Shahn: An Artist's Life ( New York: Random House, 1998).

John D. Morse, ed., Ben Shahn ( New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972).

Alma S. King, comp., Ben Shahn: Voices and Visions (Santa Fe: Santa Fe East Gallery, 1981).

To see the mural in its entirety, try one of the links below: