Exhibition of Pivotal New York Photographs by Ben Shahn Opens at Harvard University Art Museums

Exhibition Highlights Artist’s Contributions to Social Documentary Practice in the 1930s

Shahn’s Longstanding Ties to Harvard University and the Art Museums Provide Unique Perspective for Exhibition

Cambridge, MA – October 15, 1999 – Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times, drawn from the Art Museums’ extensive collection of Ben Shahn’s photographs, showcases the artist’s experimentation with and contributions to the social documentary tradition. Ben Shahn’s New York premieres on February 5, 2000, at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and will remain on view until April 30, before touring nationally. Including over 150 photographs, ink drawings, easel paintings, mural studies, and relevant ephemera, this landmark exhibition focuses on Shahn’s personal use of photography as a primary research tool for subsequent works in diverse media and offers a unique perspective for examining other aspects of Shahn’s oeuvre. Ben Shahn’s New York will give visitors the opportunity to view an important and little-examined body of Shahn’s work, which was formative for the artist’s photographic aesthetic and his working process.

By the early 1930s, Shahn propelled himself into the vanguard of social documentary practice when he began to make his own photographs. Using a handheld 35 mm Leica camera, Shahn captured scenes of ordinary life, poverty, and protest on the Lower East Side and in other neighborhoods throughout mid- and lower Manhattan. Powerful works of social realist art in their own right, Shahn used these photographs as inspiration for his socially conscious drawings, paintings, prints, and posters, as well as his public mural projects that promoted social reform programs of the day.

"Students and scholars have benefited from the unique teaching and research opportunities presented by our longstanding relationship with Ben Shahn and our exceptional holdings of Shahn’s photography," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums. "We are delighted to now share such an important aspect of Shahn’s oeuvre with the public."

Drawing upon the most comprehensive repository of Ben Shahn’s photographs worldwide and the scholarship generated by scholars working with the Shahn archive, the Harvard University Art Museums is uniquely positioned to examine the significance of Shahn’s photographic production within the larger Depression-era culture. In addition to the Art Museums’ holdings, Shahn’s longstanding ties to Harvard and the Art Museums provide an important foundation for the presentation of Ben Shahn’s New York, allowing visitors an intimate look at the remarkably rich documentary images Shahn made between circa 1931 and 1936.

Ben Shahn’s New York is organized by Deborah Martin Kao, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at Harvard; Laura Katzman, assistant professor of art and director of the museum studies program at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College; and Jenna Webster, curatorial assistant in the department of photographs at the Fogg Art Museum.

"Shahn’s New York photographs chronicle a pivotal point in the artist’s career when he emerged as a leading photographer in the field of social documentary," said Deborah Martin Kao. "In addition to experiencing an artistic reconstruction of depression-era New York, visitors will view photographs that played an invaluable role as primary research tools for Shahn’s work."

Exhibition Overview
Divided into two major interrelated sections, Ben Shahn’s New York features 150 works, both finished and preparatory, and includes photographs, related paintings, drawings, prints, and ephemera. The first section features photographs presented by neighborhood. Visitors will be brought to the streets of Shahn’s Manhattan, experiencing the infamous speakeasies and exotic cafes of Greenwich Village, street orators from Union Square and produce merchants from the East Side. This section of the exhibition also reveals urban life and landscape in the Depression and the social history of the ethnic immigrants who peopled the blocks of mid- and lower Manhattan that captivated Shahn.

The second section features photographic material and other ephemera related to Shahn’s work on public projects and the artist’s use of photography as preparatory research for other important pieces. Artists’ Union photographs by Shahn and his closest colleagues document demonstrators marching in May Day parades from Union Square to City Hall and to uptown locations where they protested cutbacks in government support and denounced international fascism at the Spanish Embassy. Many photographs in this section were intended for publication in Art Front, a leftist organ edited by Shahn for the Artists’ Union. Revealing Shahn and his comrades working to improve their own lives and the lives of those documented with their cameras, this section showcases Shahn’s protest photography as a foundation for his later political work.

The second section also includes Shahn’s preparatory photographs for the Rikers Island Penitentiary mural, Shahn’s most ambitious public mural design during the early 1930s. A history of prison reform, the mural design represents Shahn’s first use of photography as a primary research tool for a large-scale mural. Two rare panels from the completed mural study will be presented with the photographs used by Shahn and his collaborator Lou Block. Information on prison reform and the federally sponsored mural movement of the 1930s will provide context for these important works.

The exhibition concludes with an extraordinary group of photographs and related works about the Lower East Side that summarize Shahn’s attitudes towards photography. Including photographs of the working class, the indigent poor, storefronts, and immigrant communities, this section features a recently discovered intact roll of film Shahn exposed in 1936. Photographs produced from this continuous roll of film are presented in their original sequence, giving visitors the rare opportunity to see how Shahn photographed as he walked along the streets of Manhattan. Other works in this section include an enlarged contact sheet made from the intact roll of film and a 1936 issue of the Jewish Daily Forward culled from the artist’s personal archive. This material, combined with the vivid photographs of the concluding section, offers insight on Shahn’s relationship to his immigrant past and his Jewish heritage.

Shahn at Harvard
The exhibition is drawn primarily from the museum’s holdings of over 5,000 art objects in different media by Ben Shahn. Following the artist’s death in 1969, his widow donated to the Fogg Art Museum her husband’s personal collection of his own photographs. The Harvard University Art Museums, besides being a leading institution for teaching and scholarly research, is an appropriate repository because of the various roles Shahn played at Harvard during his career. A groundbreaking artist who had great impact on the field of social documentary, Shahn’s work was exhibited at Harvard when he was first gaining acclaim for his artistic definition of social issues. In 1932, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art exhibited Shahn’s controversial series of gouaches, The Passion of Sacco-Vanzetti (1931–32). This exhibition was presented in spite of the fact that Abbott Lawrence Lowell, then president of Harvard University, was caricatured by Shahn as one of the central villains of the case who served on the "Lowell Commission" that investigated charges of bias in the infamous trial. Shahn also contributed to the Harvard community as a scholar. In 1956 he was awarded the distinguished Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard, which generated his famous lectures published by Harvard University Press as The Shape of Content (1957), one of the most influential art treatises of mid-century American art.

Scholarly Publications and Programming
In conjunction with the exhibition and reflecting the Art Museums’ dedication to scholarship, Yale University Press is producing a 350-page catalogue with critical essays and full-color illustrations. Through contextual and interdisciplinary analysis of Shahn’s documentation of race, social class, and urban street life during the Great Depression, the catalogue, entitled Ben Shahn’s New York, will contribute to the larger field of American cultural and social history between the wars. The catalogue contains the following essays: Ben Shahn’s New York: Scenes from the Living Theatre by Laura Katzman; Ben Shahn and the Public Use of Art by Deborah Martin Kao; Ben Shahn and the Master Medium by Jenna Webster; and The Politics of Media: Painting and Photography in the Art of Ben Shahn by Laura Katzman.

Those interested further in Shahn’s art can consult Ben Shahn at Harvard, a searchable database of digitized images and textual information relating to the over 5,000 photographs (including negatives), prints, drawings, and paintings in the Art Museums’ collections (available once the exhibition opens and accessible through www.artmuseums.harvard.edu). Users will be able to search and access a large number of images and information on a range of topics discussed by Shahn scholars and researchers.

A variety of innovative public programs will take place while Ben Shahn’s New York is on display at Harvard. The one-day symposium entitled "Ben Shahn in Context" will be a forum to explore and debate the new scholarship on Shahn. The symposium, which will be of interest to both scholarly and public audiences, will expand on the themes raised by the exhibition, including urban life, economic hardship, race, and ethnicity. A film series will also run concurrently with the exhibition, presenting films that address the interdisciplinary themes of the project. Like many of his contemporaries, Shahn’s interest in film was broad, and having watched motion pictures childhood, he appreciated Hollywood movies as well as independent productions.

A sequence of special youth programs geared toward high school classes in art, history, social studies, and politics will draw upon the social, aesthetic, historical, and cultural themes in Shahn’s work. Younger children will be introduced to Shahn’s art through his illustrations for children’s books; many of these drawings derive from photographs appearing in Ben Shahn’s New York. A family gallery guide will also be available as part of the Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series.

The Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums comprise the Fogg Art Museum (founded in 1891, opened in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (founded in 1902, now housed in Werner Otto Hall), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (opened in 1985). The Straus Center for Conservation is located in the Fogg. Through the collections and professional practice programs, as well as a wide array of special exhibitions, scholarly programming and publications, loans, and educational initiatives and programs, the Art Museums serve Harvard University as a catalyst for instruction and scholarship, as a training ground for future academic art historians and museum professionals, and as a general resource for diverse and growing national and international audiences.

The collections of the Art Museums consist of more than 150,000 objects in all media, with works ranging from antiquity to the present and from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. The collections are divided among ten curatorial areas (Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics; architecture and design; asian art; Busch-Reisinger Museum; drawings; Islamic and later Indian art; modern and contemporary art; paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts; prints; and photographs) and are comprehensive within their areas. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, these holdings are a unique resource in breadth and quality and are enhanced continually through gifts and acquisitions. Together, they comprise one of the finest university art collections in the world, with resources rivaling those of many major public museums.

The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., and Sunday, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Closed national holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free to children under 18; and free to all individuals on Saturday mornings, 10:00 a.m.-–noon, and all day on Wednesdays.

For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. All groups of 8 or more must schedule in advance; please call (617) 496-8576. Web site: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. The Harvard University Art Museums are supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.