162
162
fresco on board 16 h × 13½ w in (41 × 34 cm)
estimate: $1,000–1,500
result: $3,432
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provenance: Collection of Ben and Bernarda Shahn
This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.
The Collection of Ben and Bernarda Shahn
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.
Being an artist is not only what you do, but also how you live your life.
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn 1898–1969
Acclaimed for his stirring works of social realism and his activism against injustice and the oppression of marginalized people, Ben Shahn occupies a place of prominence in modern American Art. Born in Lithuania in 1898, Shahn immigrated to the United States in 1902 after his father was exiled to Serbia for alleged revolutionary activities. The family settled in Brooklyn, where at a young age, Shahn began apprenticing for a lithographer. Though he would later go on to study biology at New York University, he quickly turned his focus back to art, attending the Art Students League and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris.
Shahn experienced early notoriety with a series of portraits depicting two American anarchists, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, who in 1927 were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The case sparked international outrage with many criticizing the use of circumstantial evidence and glaring ethnic prejudice. Shahn, whose commentary on political corruption and societal hardship was already central to his works, created a painting depicting the two men in shackles to be exhibited at the MoMA’s Murals by Painters and Photographers show (1932). The painting was met with controversy for its presumed communist sympathies but Shahn defended it, stating that there was no reason a painting on this subject, created with skill and sincerity, should not be exhibited.
During the Depression years, Shahn worked for the New York City Public Works Art Project and the WPA before ultimately joining the Farm Security Administration (formerly the Resettlement Administration) at the behest of his friend, Walker Evans. Having now turned to the medium of photography, Shahn’s FSA work initially consisted of New York City street scenes but soon transitioned to images of rural poverty in the southern United States. His photographs of the tenancy union suppression in Arkansas and the plight of the country’s sharecroppers were used as propaganda for the government relief programs benefiting those hardest hit by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Reflecting on his work, Shahn explained, “Our function was… to convince our congressmen and senators that this is a necessary thing… and without convincing the public, you can’t convince a congressman either.” He continued his activism as the country entered World War II in 1941, joining the Graphic Arts Division of the Office of War Information where he created anti-Nazi posters depicting the atrocities that were being committed in Europe.
After the war, Shahn took teaching positions at numerous institutions including the University of Wisconsin, University of Colorado, Harvard, and Black Mountain College. He continued in his artistic career, showing extensively in group and solo exhibitions at museums in New York, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, and Vienna as well as representing the United States at the 1954 Venice Biennale. A retrospective of his work was held in 1947 at the Museum of Modern Art and in 1948, Look magazine named him as one of the ten best American painters.
