Angry Eye

According to Painter Ben Shahn, there areonly two good excuses for art. “You paint something because you like it a lot,” he says, “or else because you hate it.” Shahn, 49, paints mostly what he hates.

His awkward, muscle-bound but often effective pictures were honored last week with a retrospective show at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. The 55 temperas and gouaches on exhibition were sharply drawn, flatly painted reminders of the Sacco-Vanzetti and Tom Mooney cases, the slum children who scrabble for happiness in high-walled playgrounds, the gnarled and stunted poor, the dead on the Pacific beaches, the ruins of Europe, the faces of the starved.

A big, apparently good-natured man with a soft voice, Shahn seems much gentler than his work. To please his wife and three children he lives in a federal housing development in Roosevelt, N.J., and serves as a town councilman. But he is city-bred, and complains that the countryside “looks like Sunday every day.”

Among the few rural paintings in Shahn’s show was one of a solitary workman playing Pretty Girl Milking the Cow on a harmonica. It was far from pastoral. Whenever he can, he visits Manhattan “to see my reflection in the windows and rub elbows with the crowd. I take in all the newsreels too, and I think they influence my work quite a bit. Movies are really the master medium.”

After 17 years of commercial lithography and another 17 years of intermittent struggle, Shahn has become the country’s most successful practitioner of protest painting. His art is so close to propaganda that some of his pictures have been converted into posters (for the OWI, the War Department and the C.I.O.) simply by the addition of lettering. Like most propaganda art, Shahn’s suffers from sameness of theme, but sometimes it offers a concise pictorial report as well as a message. Shahn learned to draw the hard way; when he was growing up in Brooklyn, the local toughs used to make him draw chalk portraits of their favorite athletes on the sidewalk. Accuracy was imperative, and Shahn never forgot the lesson. Although Shahn’s use of color has gradually become so arbitrary as to verge on artiness, his draftsmanship is often realistic and clear-cut.

“There’s a difference,” he explains, “in the way a $12 coat wrinkles from the way a $75 coat wrinkles. And that has to be right. It’s just as important, esthetically, as the difference in the light of the Ile de France and the Brittany coast. Maybe it’s more important. If I look at an ordinary overcoat as if I never saw it before, then it becomes as fit a subject for painting as one of Titian’s purple cloaks.”

Shahn’s realism is apt to falter when he tries to reproduce a tree in the wind or the curve of a hill. “That part doesn’t interest me so much,” he says. “God can do what He likes, but man is more surprising.”