When the last major Ben Shahn retrospective opened almost five decades ago in New York City, critics of record were unanimous in their indictment of the Jewish Museum exhibition. For Hilton Kramer at The New York Times, Shahn’s practice amounted to little more than giving “expression to social allegiances and emotions that his admirers already felt,” a process that resulted in the “dilution and vulgarization” of the project of modern painting. In The New Yorker, former fellow traveler Harold Rosenberg was more critical of the curators, who he felt reduced Shahn’s work to a “moralizing impulse” that characterized his work as “the reiteration of hurt and complaint, within an ambience of casual insights, sentiments, and fantasies.” The great curatorial challenge with exhibiting Shahn, according to Rosenberg, was “to present an unfamiliar Shahn, albeit one justified by the actual count of his creation.”

It is hard to overemphasize how far Shahn had fallen in the eyes of the art establishment between his death in 1969 and his retrospective less than a decade later. In 1947 he had been the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; in 1954 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where European critics for the first time acknowledged that there might be something like an American vanguard. Many more prizes and retrospectives followed until his death. Yet by the ’80s and ’90s, as the Cold War was coming to a close, he was being erased: written out of survey classes on 20th-century art and removed from permanent collection displays.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” a retrospective curated by Laura Katzman with Dr. Stephen Brown at the Jewish Museum, attempts to put the artist back on the map by recasting him as a pioneer of social justice. The exhibition brings together his paintings, mural studies, posters, drawings, photographs, and numerous illustrations for books and magazines. It is loosely chronological, narrating Shahn’s work alongside major political events: the politicization of the arts during the Popular Front in the 1930s, his Resettlement Administration work (1935–38), his mural commissions, his employment as senior liaison officer in the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information, his tenure as chief artist of the CIO’s Political Action Committee, his CBS blacklisting in the 1950s, and his involvement in the civil rights movement. Ben Shahn was, without question, an artist with political convictions. His public life was bound up with causes. Yet to stop there is to mistake him for an illustrator of politics rather than an artist whose work unsettles the very categories it appears to serve. His art bore witness but also withheld, accused without consoling, resisting both abstraction’s purity and propaganda’s clarity. To grasp this tension is to grasp the achievement and the difficulty of the Jewish Museum’s new retrospective.

The exhibition opens with The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32), the series that first made Shahn’s reputation, flanking the section “Art and Activism.” Across more than 20 paintings, he depicted the controversial conviction and execution of two Italian American workers and labor organizers. The trial had taken place a decade prior to their making, so the curatorial framing as activism misses the strangeness of Shahn’s foray into history painting. Shahn’s figures are distorted, their faces angular, crude, and deadpan, eyes rarely aligned, “almost to the point of revulsion,” as a critic in the Communist Party newspaper People’s World observed in 1948. Victims and perpetrators alike are marked by caricatural disfigurement, a grotesque line that withholds the consolations of empathy. These are not portraits of innocence and guilt; they are tableaux of social fracture—Sacco and Vanzetti as emblematic of something more rotten in American life. If the faces repel, truth emerges elsewhere.

Apprenticed at age 14 as a lithographer on the Lower East Side, earning one dollar a week, it was here where Shahn developed the chiseled line that became his signature. These lines are most eloquent in the rendering of hands—bound together in chains, raised in demonstration, resting on coffins scratched out of the canvas. Tubular hands often stand for corruption, muscular ones for sincerity. Clothing, too, receives diagnostic attention, heavily modeled compared to the faces. “There’s a difference in the way a twelve-dollar coat wrinkles from the way a seventy-five-dollar coat wrinkles,” he remarked, “and that has to be right.” Status and exploitation reveal themselves not in the face but in the “accidental,” a much sought-after quality in American art of the 1930s that was rushing to capture the details of everyday life. Shahn packed his early paintings with such details—not to beautify or overwhelm but to give charged evidence, allowing the viewer to engage in a forensic exercise of discerning class, status, and social tension.

The ambiguity of his images was what many prized at the time. For more moderate figures like Lincoln Kirstein, Shahn “installed the actors of that tragedy in their proper places in the frame, and their arrangement is an inscription more surgical than any partisan approach.” From Trotskyists like Diego Rivera to Communists writing in the Daily Worker, praise abounded, extending even to Abby Rockefeller—hardly a proletarian—who wanted to buy the entire Sacco and Vanzetti series, joking, “Come the Revolution, I can fill the windows with these, and the House of Rockefeller may survive.” And while Shahn briefly flirted with Party membership, he was critical of Rivera and the Popular Front’s didactic aesthetics. Assisting on the doomed Rockefeller Center mural, he found Rivera’s composition “crowded” and like “too many words.”

Current Issue

October 2025 Issue

One of the most striking sections of the Jewish Museum exhibition brings together Shahn’s photographs of the 1930s and the paintings they spawned. Back in 2000, Katzman had co-organized Ben Shahn’s New York, a landmark exhibition that established Shahn as a major photographer. With this new retrospective, she pushes further, showing his process of translation and recycling, with photography functioning simultaneously as documentary record, book illustration, source image, and visual archive.

The turning point for his use of photography came in 1933, when Walker Evans, his studio mate, suggested that Shahn use his camera to gather material for a proposed, but ultimately aborted, Rikers Island mural. From that moment, Shahn relied less on mass-circulation press clippings—the basis for his narrative paintings like Sacco and Vanzetti—and more on his own lens. He began constructing what he called “image words”: collages of several photographs, often showing the same subject from different angles, captioned with single words. These montages displaced drawing, functioning as the scaffolding for paintings.

The exhibition makes this translation vivid with a pairing: the photograph Untitled [Steel Strike, Warren, Ohio] (1937) and the painting Puddlers’ Sunday (1937–38). In the photograph, men gather during a strike, their bodies tense with the latent threat of violence. In the painting, the same men stand idly by a Buick on a dirt road, the new title all but erasing the context of the strike, depicting, instead, leisure and boredom. The transformation is disconcerting, and far from unique. Again and again in the late 1930s and 1940s, Shahn subtly removes overt political antagonisms, turning traces of action into what his biographer described in 1951 as “depressingly banal” genre scenes.

How to read this disappearance? Was it strategic, because patrons were more comfortable with muted scenes of everyday life than with picket lines? Was it not suppression but a way of registering futility? Or was it an aesthetic principle, a belief that the violence inscribed in the photographs carried their original context into the paintings, giving scenes of seeming banality an uncanny charge?

His recycling of the photograph Sam Nichols, Tenant Farmer, Boone County, Arkansas (1935) suggests the latter. The image became a kind of Byzantine icon for Shahn. He used it as the source for 1943 AD (c. 1943), one of his few works addressing the Holocaust; for Man (1946); for Artist and Politicians (1953), and Flowering Brushes (1968), among others. The tenant farmer became a visual manifestation of suffering that could embody the Great Depression, the concentration camps, McCarthy-era persecution, and the spiritual longing for transcendence, all at once.

The exhibition tends to frame these works as forerunners of an art committed to social justice. But this lens obfuscates that Shahn was less a producer of clear political messages than an artist pioneering new ways to move between photography and painting, commercial and fine art—an approach that would later resonate with Pop artists. His many attempts at posters are in fact just as much examples of how “to support labor in his political art,” as the section text of “The Labor Movement” reads, as they are traces of complications and misunderstandings. Many were never printed at scale because their meaning was judged too ambiguous; when they were, they were sometimes altered without his consent, as in Our Friend (1944), where the lithographer softened the grotesque faces of workers. Others languished in union offices because they were, in one officer’s words, “meaningless to labor in the sticks.” What emerges is not the triumphal story of an artist’s capability at political messaging but a portrait of someone wrestling with how to reconcile an increasing divide between progressivism in fine art and movement politics.

If Shahn’s early art took specific injustices as its starting point—Sacco and Vanzetti in the courtroom, miners on strike, workers waiting for relief—the aftermath of World War II propelled him into a different register. In place of the “accidental” details celebrated in the 1930s, Shahn pursued allegory: “I wanted to reach farther, to tap some sort of universal experience,” he wrote, “to create symbols that would have some such universal quality.”

This turn aligned him, paradoxically, with the very avant-garde against which he was later pitted against. Abstract Expressionism, too, was abandoning the everyday in favor of myth and metaphor. Shahn’s paintings of the late 1940s and 1950s—figures dwarfed by ominous space, cryptic hands inscribed with text, angelic messengers adrift in color fields—share the ambition if not the idiom. When he was teaching at Black Mountain College in 1951, his backgrounds began to open outward, absorbing the gaze into layered pigment and scraped surfaces, disorienting the gaze rather than channeling it. He followed his lifelong interest in Paul Klee, experimenting with palimpsest textures and gestural surfaces that pulled the eye away from narrative detail and into abstract contemplations.

The shift can partly be read as self-protection, allegory affording cover amid Cold War politics. By 1947, conservatives had targeted him directly: an unsuccessful campaign to remove his Social Security mural, FBI surveillance, even blacklisting by CBS, which had hired him to design a series of ad campaigns. (Ironically, the gig later passed to Andy Warhol, then still making his name on Madison Avenue as a Shahn emulator.) But to see the shift only as evasion is to underestimate its force. Shahn himself had grown uneasy with the Popular Front, with their faith in the snapshot of daily life as politics incarnate. Allegory was not just refuge but conviction: a wager that painting might articulate the universal without abandoning the human.

By the 1960s, Shahn had become a paradoxical figure. Once a central proponent of capturing everyday life and democratizing access to art, he established himself as a leading commercial artist on Madison Avenue (an aspect unfortunately absent from the exhibition) while exploring biblical allegories and musical themes in his paintings. Meanwhile, political topics such as the Vietnam War or the nuclear bomb were largely filtered through an idiosyncratic symbolism. These late works, with their hovering angels and lyrical inscriptions, found admirers but also alienated many who began dismissing Shahn’s allegorical figuration as sentimental or evasive in an art world increasingly dominated by Pop and Minimalism. But it took Shahn’s death in 1969 and the increasingly rigid narratives of the origins of American art centering on Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism as promoted by William Rubin at MoMA and elsewhere to fully write him out of survey shows and textbooks over the course of the 1970s.

The achievement of “On Nonconformity” lies in its effort to free Shahn from the silos that constrained him after his marginalization. It also fully demonstrates the permeability of his work across media: how photographs became paintings, paintings became murals, murals became posters, and posters circulated back into books, ad campaigns and magazines (The Nation being among them). In doing so, the exhibition contributes to the broader revision of 20th-century art history now underway. After decades in which Cold War art historians insisted on the linear evolution of abstraction and formal reduction, museums are reopening the record to the many histories of figuration that perforated modernism—Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA, for instance, or Alice Neel and the Harlem Renaissance at the Met, and the many surveys of so-called global modernism.

Shahn also reminds us how incomplete this revision still is: He cannot be captured by an art history that solely relies on either form or politics to inform its progression. Shahn was a man of unresolved tensions, between ideology and art, conviction and aesthetics. But once you give into the strangeness of his work, the unfamiliarity Rosenberg called for, it becomes impossible not to glimpse his legacy everywhere: in Philip Guston’s late cityscapes, in Warhol’s barbed-wire lines conflating commercial and fine art, in Julie Mehretu’s layered appropriations of mass-media images.

In his 1957 lecture “Realism Reconsidered,” Shahn lamented that the label of “moral realism” had clung to him like a “noose”—a characterization he could never quite escape, no matter what he did. The time has come to release him from that trap.