Lithuanian Jews on Postage Stamps 

Ben Shahn 1898-1969

by Vitaly Charny

The painter, muralist, and printmaker, Ben Shahn, who was born in 1898 in Kovno, Russia (now Kaunas, Lithuania), into a family of Jewish craftsmen, moved with his family to New York City in 1906. I found a very interesting description of Shahn’s family and his childhood in the biography Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life by Howard Greenfeld. There is a link to the first chapter of the book which was published on the Internet at the end of this article.

In 1913-17 Shahn was a lithographer's apprentice while attending high school at night. He later attended New York University, the College of the City of New York, and the National Academy of Design in New York. His travels back to Europe in 1925 and 1927 exposed him to the works of the European masters.

Shahn's first major work (1931-32) was a series of paintings of the trial of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Shahn expressed his sympathy for the defendants with great emotional power and satiric bite. That series, which brought him fame, was followed in 1932-33 by another famous trial, this one of the labor leader Tom Mooney. Later he made another famous series about the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat that wandered into a nuclear test zone. 

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (known as the Volstead Act) banned the manufacture, distribution, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages in the years between 1920 and 1933, the era of Prohibition. When it quickly became apparent that the strict enforcement of such legislated social change would be impossible to achieve, New York City became a prime source of demand for bootleg alcohol. This illegal system mainly supplied the estimated thirty-two thousand speakeasies -- double the number of legitimate saloons that were in the city before 1920. 

A 150-stamp set, Celebrate The Century, was the US Postal Service’s attempt to reflect 20^th century American history in philately. One of the stamps in this series, Prohibition Enforced, depicts a detail from the Ben Shahn painting, now in the Museum of the City of New York, showing the federal agents disposing of the wine.

In 1933 Shahn enrolled in the New York City Public Works Art Project, under which he did a series of works on the Prohibition era. From 1935 to 1938 he worked for the Farm Security Administration as an artist and photographer. He took over six thousand photographs about the life of every day working people in the southern and middle western states.

In 1938-39 Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Brysen, executed a series of panels for the lobby of the Bronx post office, New York City, a work that took the form of a geographic panorama of American life.

Ben Shahn’s social awareness made him protest against the abstract expressionism that dominated American art during that time: “Is there nothing to weep about in this world anymore? Is all our pity and anger to be reduced to a few tastefully arranged straight lines or petulant squirts from a tube held over a canvas?” 

The first major retrospective of his paintings was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1948 and was followed by many others all over the world. Much of Shahn’s works contained Jewish themes, and his calligraphy frequently used the Hebrew alphabet as in the Alphabet of Creation, and Haggadah which was handwritten and illustrated by him in the 1967 Ecclesiast. In addition, he created murals for Jewish congregations including Mishkan Israel in New Haven, Connecticut, and Ohab Shalom in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as two mosaics for the Israeli oceanic ship Shalom. These mosaics were purchased by the New Jersey State Museum when the Shalom went out of service.  

Ben Shahn said, “I hate injustice. I guess that’s about the only thing that I really do hate… and I hope I will go on hunting it all my life.” His work reflects his concern with injustice, political freedom, and the state of humanity. 

Ben Shahn died on March 14, 1969, in New York City.

REFERENCES:

1. American Jewish Desk Reference, Random House, NY: 1999 

2. Geoffrey Wigoder: Dictionary of Jewish Biography, Simon and Schuster, NY: 1991

3. Ben Shahn - An Artist's Life (Chapter 1), Random House, NY, and NY Times review http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/greenfeld-shahn.html  

LINKS:

Ben Shahn at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum  http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/shahn/servlet/webpublisher.WebCommunication?ia=tr&ic=pt&t=xhtml&x=introduction

ArtCyclopedia: Ben Shahn on the Internet  http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/shahn_ben.html {which has links to additional articles about him as well as the works he created}