Ben Shahn

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Benjamin Zwi Shahn (born September 12, 1898 in Kaunas , Lithuania , Russian Empire ; † March 14, 1969 in New York City , New York ) was an American painter and graphic artist and is considered a representative of social realism , a direction of American realism . He also emerged artistically as a photographer .

Life

The original tempera -Painting The Passion of Sacco & Vanzetti reinvented mosaic by Ben Shahn, which interprets the funeral of Sacco and Vanzetti, on a wall of Syracuse University , New York State
Ben Shahn poster from 1946 for exercising political rights

Shahn's parents emigrated to the United States of America with him in 1906. There the young man Ben went to apprenticeship as a lithographer . From 1919 he studied at New York State University and then at City College in New York . In 1922 he moved to the National Academy of Design . In 1956 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1959 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Shahn also used photographic templates for his pictures, first from newspapers, later he began to take photos himself and use his own photos. On the streets of New York, he photographed and documented the lives of workers and immigrants during the Great Depression. At the same time he became an early exponent of street photography .

plant

Middle panel of the Jersey Homesteads wall painting (1937–1938) photographed by Paolo Monti in 1972

In his pictures Shahn tried to depict forms of society and their grievances in a form of naive realism . When he met Diego Rivera in the 1930s, he came to mural painting. The most important works by Shahn include the images Ohio Magic and The Passion of Sacco & Vanzetti (The funeral of the executed Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–32). In the latter, he processed the controversial death sentence of the American judiciary against Sacco and Vanzetti from 1927, which was internationally known and criticized by a worldwide public as a politically motivated wrong judgment.

Works by Ben Shahn were represented at documenta 2 (1959), documenta III (1964), and also after his death at documenta 6 in 1977 in Kassel .

Exhibitions

  • Ben Shahn: Paintings and Drawings , 1930, Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York, New York
  • 57th Annual American Exhibition: Water Colors and Drawings , 1946, Tate Gallery in London, England
  • Ben Shahn: A Retrospective , 1947, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
  • Esposizione Biennale Internationale D'Arte XXVII , 1954 in Venice, Italy
  • Ben Shahn , 1962, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium; Galleria Nazionale D'arte Moderna in Rome, Italy and Albertina in Vienna, Austria.
  • The Collected Prints of Ben Shahn , 1969, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
  • Ben Shahn: A Retrospective Exhibition , 1969, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey.
  • Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times , 2000–2001, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

literature

  • Ben Shahn: painting / graphics . Introduction by James Thrall Soby; Foreword by Werner Haftmann . Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag 1964.
  • Alain Weill: Encyclopédie de l'affiche . Editions Hazan, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-7541-0582-8 , pp. 366-367 m. Fig.

Web links

Commons : Ben Shahn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Illustration and brief information on an art project page. ( Memento from February 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Members: Ben Shahn. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 25, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Shahn, Ben
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shahn, Benjamin Zwi (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and printmaker
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaunas , Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1969
Place of death New York City , New York