The shape of Ben Shahn

I picked up Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" from the library a few weeks ago. I've always admired his engagement in the political and social realities around him, although sometimes his work veers into illustration. But some pieces hit me hard.

His painting of "The Passion of Sacco and Venzetti" in their coffins haunts me. Shahn believed in the innocence of both Sacco and Venzetti, and painted them compassionately as corpses laying below a triumvirate of academics, bureaucrats and the judge responsible for allowing a travesty of justice.

I believe Shahn was wrong about the two Italian men being wrongly accused. I don't think both Sacco and Venzetti were innocent; there is a lot of evidence to indict Sacco and plenty to exonerate Venzetti. As I read more about the case, a strange thing happened. Instead of dismissing Shahn's work, I began to appreciate it even more.

When I was a reporter, I would keep a postcard of this painting beside my desk as a reminder that the real story is always more interesting than the agitprop, but that a faith in humanism, rationality and compassion always bubbles to the surface. I look at Shahn's painting now and I can see Sacco as guilty, but still feel something that goes beyond a question of guilt and innocence.

All of this is to say I was interested in Ben Shahn's creative process. So, without further ado, here are some of the more interesting quotes from "The Shape of Content."

I have never met a literary critic of painting who, whatever his sentiments toward the artist, would actually destroy an existing painting. He would regard such an act as vandalism and would never consider it. But the critic within the artist is a ruthless destroyer. He continually rejects the contradictory elements within a painting, the colors that do not act upon other colors and would thus constitute dead places within his work; he rejects insufficient drawing; he rejects forms and colors incompatible with the intention or mood of the piece; he rejects intention itself and mood itself as banal or derivative. He mightily applauds the good piece of work; he cheers the successful passage; but then if the painting does not come up to his standards he casts aside everything and obliterates the whole.

Shahn's book comes from a series of lectures he gave at Harvard. A good portion of the book is dedicated to art education.

During the early French-influenced part of my artistic career, I painted landscapes in a Post-Impressionist vein, pleasantly peopled with bathers, or I painted nudes, or studies of my friends. The work had a nice professional look about it, and it rested, I think, on a fairly solid academic training. It was during those years that the inner critic first began to play hara-kiri with my insides. With such ironic words as, "It has a nice professional look about it," my inward demon was prone to ridicule or tear down my work in just those terms in which I was wont to admire it.

The questions "Is that enough? Is that all?" began to plague me. Or, "This may be art, but is it my own art?"

Shahn's lectures were given during the apex of the New York school of abstract expressionism, and he deals with abstraction in a funny way. As a painter drawn to social issues, you'd think Shahn's concerns would be quite different from de Kooning's or Rothko's. I don't think Shahn understands abstraction, but I think he's right here:

When we sit in judgment upon a certain kind of form--and it is usually called lack of form--what we do actually is to sit in judgment upon a certain kind of content.

Shahn goes on to wrestle with what the content of abstraction is. I won't quote any of that.

Here an interesting story that gets at Shahn's values:

I remember a story that my father used to tell of a traveler in thirteenth-century France who met three men wheeling wheelbarrows. He asked in what work they were engaged and he received from them the following three answers: the first said, "I toil from sunup to sundown and all I receive for my pains is a few francs a day." The second said, "I am glad enough to wheel this wheelbarrow for I have been out of work for many months and I have a family to support. The third said, "I am building Chartres Cathedral."

I always feel that the committees and and the tribunals and the civic groups and their auxiliaries harbor no misgivings about the men who wheel their wheelbarrows for however many francs a day; the object of their suspicions seems, inevitably, to be the man who is building Chartres Cathedral.

Shahn also talks about the obsession with all things latest and greatest:

But let us not sit in judgment on the general public for betraying such weaknesses; the more sophisticated circles are quite as strongly swayed by the new. The new off-Broadway play, the latest Japanese film, the most recent novel by Beckett--all derive a value from their newness that may have little bearing upon their quality. ... Under such a necessity art can be pushed to meaningless extremes. And it is a constant struggle to wrench out of the paint tube something that is still newer than new. Of course when such work becomes dated, its emptiness emerges, for nothing is so hard to look at as the stylish, out of style.

Towards the end of his book, Shahn talks about how we measure the work of art.

One of the very recherche bases of evaluation but still one that dominates both the world of criticism and that of creative art is an inversion of the common standard of popularity. The reasoning goes something like this: public taste has often failed to understand very great art, has indeed violently rejected it. This very art, however, so often has been richly vindicated by time and subsequent tastes. Logically, then, it seems to follow that if a piece of work is truly great it will necessarily be rejected by the public. Here the inversion begins to emerge, for the belief has thus become universal among refined people that if a work of art is thoroughly incomprehensible to the public it must automatically be good. And out of that non-Aristotelian reasoning comes the following principle widely proclaimed by artists and by critics: the work of art must not appeal to the public, or be understood by it. "I hope," says one artist, "that I will never win public approval, for if I do I know my work is bad." "I tremble," says an eminent poet, "when I think of what will happen if the classics become available to the masses."

Like most artists I am deeply offended by the application of public approval as a standard for the evaluation of art. But I am certainly equally in disagreement with that curiously perverse standard of nonapproval. For however degraded the public intelligence may have become through long-term, calculated efforts to pander to it, or however spoiled the public eye, it is still the public itself that is the reality of our culture. Here is the fertile soil in which to sow your lillies. He is the source of manifold instances of art, the wellspring of emotions that are not warmed-over, and of unexpected, unique detail. We, as artists, may exist upon the fringe of this reality or we may be an essential part of it; that is up to us.

Whenever I hear someone talk about "the public," as Shahn does, I guess that they're talking about a period that ended in the early '60s. Entertainment culture has made these relationships much more complicated. Art is both everywhere and nowhere. The YBAs can draw huge crowds, but at the same time has forsaken any part in the larger dialogue outside of the museum. What would Shahn make of Damien Hirst, I wonder?