Ben Shahn's strange York: The Photography of recent Times Arthur M Sackler Museum The Harvard University Art Museums Cambridge.

Ben Shahn's strange York: The Photography of recent Times

Arthur M Sackler Museum

The Harvard University Art Museums

Cambridge, Massachusetts

February 5-April 30 2000

Ben Shahn's of the present day York: The Photography of recent Times

by Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman and Jenna Webster

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2000

340 pp/$4500 (sb)

The Phillips Collection

Washington, DC

June 10-August 27 2000

The Grey Art Gallery

just discovered York University

fresh York, New York

November 14 2000-January 27 2001

The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

April 19-June 17 2001

Ben Shahn had a remarkable career as a photographer, painter, graphic artist and activist, whose sharp observations and critical analysis brought enormous insight into the life and politics of his era. However, until the last scarcely any years, most studies have relegated Shahn to a minor position in the history of American art. The exhibition Ben Shahn's of recent origin York: The Photography of late Times and its accompanying catalog focus almost exclusively upon a short but formative period of Shahn's career, center forward the street photographs he made in fresh York City in the early to mid-1930s. The throw contributes to new ongoing scholarly consideration of the long career of this involved political artist. Shahn's New York photographs were central to the growth of his aesthetic and at the same time they provided him with a resource of urban images to which he recured again and again for his paintings and graphic artworks.

The curators' decision to focus exclusively upon the New York photographs, made before his better-known works as a staff photographer for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) from 1935 to 1938 has several virtues. First, the exhibition publicizes a puissance of the major personal archive of Shahn photographs, negatives and contact strips now in the collection (donated in 1970 at Bernarda Bryson Shahn, the photographer's widow) of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. Perhaps more significantly, this shut examination of such a brief period in Shahn's career is a window into in what manner urban life and left politics influenced the art of the 1 930 Members of the artistic and intellectual community in of the present day York City, including Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein, who included Shahn's work in the 1932 exhibition he curated for the Museum of recent Art (MoMA), "Murals by American Painters and Photographers," promot documentary photographs as an art form in their allow r ight. Another part of the of recent origin York art world in which Shahn played a larger character was the Artists' Union, l on Stuart Davis. Long engaged with radical politics, Shahn had joined the Young People's Socialist League at age 16 and sharpened his political aesthetic while learning fresco painting technique as an assistant to Diego Rivera upon the Rockefeller Center murals in 1933

The first half of the exhibition "Ben Shahn's fresh York" is structured according to the different Manhattan neighborhoods--including the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Union Square and Midtown--that the artist observ in his unpos photographs, ofttimes taken with a right angle viewfinder in order to capture his make liables unaware. This format of organizing the exhibition by the and of the theme of neighborhoods allows comparison of Shahn's images across time and media. Shahn turn backed to his New York images through and over, using them as the basis for drawings and paintings in succeeding decades. Displaying work that spans the decades within each section provides insights into the continuity and evolution of Shahn's ideas that would not appear with a more conventional chronological structure

Shahn's documentary photography in the early 1930 was distinctive for its sensitive treatment of urban distress race relations and Jewish and Italian immigrant improvements Working neither for the dominion programs nor corporate publications, Shahn's independent production of documentary was somewhat anomalous for the era. He did, however, publish an of his street photography in left political journals, of the like kind as New Theatre and Art brass Laura Katzman's thoughtful analysis in her first catalog essay, "Ben Shahn's just discovered York: Scenes from the Living Theatre," occupys on close study of composition and iconographic analysis of word fragments and signs, and the unplanned narrative resulting from the working arrangement recorded on Shahn's contact strips. Katzman wafts Shahn's approach to his exposes by studying three or four consecutive images in succession 35 millimeter contact prints. Shahn wandered around of recent origin York City with specific themes in mind, of that kind as homeless men lying onward street grates, photographing subjects who wer e likely unaware that they were being photographed. Katzman argues for the social significance of the images as one as well as the other witnesses to urban poverty and agents for change. She questions the now familiar general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of documentary photography as "double subjugation," that is, the person--already loaded by poverty--becomes spectacle for succeeding viewers. Rather, Katzman believes that "Shahn's photographs of fresh York's underclass defy such reductive categorization; his bring under rules are neither victimized nor sanitized."