Painting: Mellowed Militant

“I’m stubborn,” Ben Shahn insists at 69. “I paint two things: what I love and what I abhor.”

For the first 20 years of his career, Shahn’s hates were what his public loved best—his scarifying gouaches of the 1921 Sacco-Vanzetti trial, his browbeaten bread-liners of the Depression, his concentration-camp victims of World War II. Since the mid-1950s, however, his work has mellowed. Nowadays, Shahn’s gift is spurred as often by fondness as it is by rancor.

In fact, a major retrospective of 78 paintings and drawings on display last week at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California includes a veritable gallery of Shahn’s recent enthusiasms (see color opposite). The sparkling poster for the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, executed at the request of Composer Gian Carlo Menotti, shows a dashing harlequin of the Italian Renaissance theater’s commedia dell’ arte.

Cast-Off Antlers. The poster for an off-Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge was done after Shahn had seen the play at rehearsal. He found it “very powerful, very moving.” Shahn’s watercolor, Branches of Water or Desire, reflects his admiration for the poetry of his son-in-law, Alan Dugan, who won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 with his first volume. The picture illustrates one of the poems, which begins

Imagine that the fast life of a bird sang in the branches of the cold cast-off antlers of a stag.

The poem compares both bird song and discarded antlers to the mysterious urge of the human mind to create. When Dugan saw the eerie anguish with which Shahn had endowed his subject, he went back to reread his poem. Shahn liked the watercolor so much that he redid it as a silk-screen print, making 50 copies. “I love doing public art,” he explains. “Whenever a collector buys a painting of mine, he goes off and I never see it again.”

Rembrandt Etchings. This year will be a proudly public one for Shahn. In addition to the California show, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is staging an exhibit of his graphics in November. This month, he completes a large, mosaic mural version of his Sacco-Vanzetti series at the University of Syracuse. He still contributes posters to such causes as S.N.C.C., and he sells every painting he produces—at prices ranging up to $15,000 apiece. Shahn’s home is in Roosevelt, N.J., a community founded in the 1930s as a New Deal relocation center for unemployed garment workers. Commissioned by the Government to do a mural for the local school, he became so attached to the town that he took a bungalow there. Today his house, set in 80 acres of community woodlands, is chockablock with Rembrandt etchings, Hindu gouaches and pre-Columbian sculpture. Noticeably thinner after a heart attack last winter, Shahn nevertheless still drives his Mercedes into Manhattan to wander through the streets of his boyhood, spent in Chinatown, the Lower East Side and Little Italy. “I’m not much for museums or galleries,” he says. “If the painting is good, I’m jealous. If it’s bad, I’m bored.” When it comes to art, he prefers his own studio, where he is forever experimenting with tempera, watercolor, glass and inks. “I try to use the medium that suits that particular thing at that particular time,” he explains. “I like to use a bastard medium. I am a pro, you know, and I turn to anything at will.”