Ben Shahn met writer and artist Bernarda Bryson in 1933 while working as an assistant to Diego Rivera at the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Bryson, the daughter of a newspaper editor and publisher from Athens, OH, was in New York on assignment as an art critic to interview Diego but quickly found a rapport with Shahn. Within a few short years, Bryson was accompanying Shahn on his trips throughout rural America while he served with the Farm Security Administration, creating a series of lithographs entitled The Vanishing American Frontier. Before the decade was out, the couple had returned to the East Coast and settled in Roosevelt, NJ, just east of Princeton, where a federal relief program had recently created a modernist subdivision.
Shahn and Bryson would live out the rest of their lives in their cinder block Bauhaus home, surrounded by a politically progressive community where they amassed a collection reflecting their personalities and values. Amid furniture pieces by George Nakashima were illuminated Indian manuscripts, classical sculpture, and works by Shahn’s contemporaries including Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfred Maurer.
Each was committed to their artistic career, Shahn creating and showing works alongside his teaching engagements after the war, Bryson illustrating for Fortune, Harper’s, and Scientific America before turning to book illustration in the mid-1950s. Following Shahn’s death in 1969, Bryson remained in their Roosevelt home where the couple had hosted friends and luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Dorothea Lange, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alfred Barr, and Alexander Calder. Throughout the 1980s and until her death at the age of 101, Bryson focused her energies on producing the realist and surrealist paintings for which she would become best known. She participated in solo exhibitions at the Midtown and Susan Teller Galleries in New York as well as the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, and served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts Award from the 1989 Women’s Caucus for Art and an honorary doctorate from Ohio University, her work can be found in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
