Social realism art movement

Fresco Painting

In Shahn was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to complete a large, single fresco painting in the community centre of a federal housing project for garment workers in Roosevelt, New Jersey.

Ben shahn biography Ben Shahn (born September 12, , Kaunas, Russia [now in Lithuania]—died March 14, , New York, New York, U.S.) was an American painter and graphic artist whose work, displaying a combination of realism and abstraction, addressed various social and political causes.

The mural depicts the arrival of immigrants to the United States - including Albert Einstein - after fleeing persecution in Europe, as well as scenes of sweatshop labour, the Triangle Shirt factory fire, and images of social reform symbolized by new homes and better working conditions. [See also the photographic work of his FSA colleague Dorothea Lange ()] The following year Shahn and his wife Bernarda Bryson won a commission from the US Treasury to paint thirteen large-scale fresco panels on the theme of industry and agriculture for the lobby of the Bronx Central Annex Post Office in New York.

During the period Shahn concentrated on frescos for the main corridor of the Federal Security Building in Washington DC.

See also: Walker Evans (), best known for his FSA photographs of southern America during the Great Depression.

In , following the entry of the United States into World War II, Shahn joined the graphic arts division of the Office of War Information.

He produced a number of outstanding posters and painted numerous works in which he demonstrated his sympathy for the plight of the ruined countries and people involved in the war.

Post-War "Personal Realism"

After the war, Shahn went back to easel-painting, turning to allegory and symbolism, and became more interested in what he called "personal realism".

Shahn biography Ben Shahn (September 12, – March 14, ) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shan. [1].

In Harper's magazine asked Shahn to illustrate an account of a Chicago tenement fire in which a tenant called Hickman had lost four children. Hickman had then killed his landlord, whom he believed had deliberately started the fire. Unlike the more realist documentation of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in Allegory () Shahn symbolized the tenement fire as a raging beast under whose belly lie Hickman's dead children.

Shahn also devoted more time to non-political decorative art, becoming active in the design of stained glass and mosaic art, and also earned money as a magazine and book illustrator.

From the early s, he spent more time writing about art, and in published Paragraphs on Art - a book of essays and articles.

Jonathan shahn biography Shahn's family immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, when he was eight. As a teenager, Shahn was apprenticed to a lithographer, becoming attuned to considering typesetting as composition, letters as shapes in space, and nuances of line. The spiky sensitive draftsmanship that characterizes his art reflects these experiences.

In he was appointed Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard University.

The Lucky Dragon

In Shahn completed what many regard as his finest works of oil painting, on a theme entitled The Lucky Dragon. The 11 oils, along with numerous sketches and examples of preparatory drawing, were inspired by the tragedy in of the Japanese fishing boat Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon), which unwittingly sailed into the Bikini Atoll in the North Pacific where H-bombs were being tested.

The Lucky Dragon and her crew were showered with radioactive dust. Shahn represented the radioactive cloud above the boat as a flying monster in We Did Not Know What Happened to Us ().

Paintings by Ben Shahn can be seen in many of the best art museums in America.