Boone County, Arkansas. The family of a Resettlement Administration client in the doorway of their home

Maker Shahn, Ben Lithuanian, 1898-1968

Date1935

MediumGelatin silver print

Dimensionsoverall: 7 in x 9 in

Credit LineMuseum purchase

Object number2007:20

About the ArtistBen Shahn worked in painting, printmaking, design, and photography, and was a central figure in American social realism. This movement, which flourished between the two World Wars, centered the socio-political qualms of the working class to critique the social systems responsible for growing bleak conditions.
Shahn’s work was informed by his background. In 1902, Shahn and his family were forced to flee their home country of Lithuania after his father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activity. They resettled in 1906 in Brooklyn, New York. As a teenager, Shahn trained as an apprentice lithographer, becoming attuned to details of line, space, and composition. He went on to attend the City College of New York and the National Academy of Design, and then traveled across Europe in the late 1920s, where he was exposed to 15th and 16th century art that inspired his early paintings.

Shahn began to receive recognition in 1932 when he created a bold series of paintings documenting the contentious US murder trial of two Italian-American immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 1933, he assisted Diego Rivera in his execution of the Man at the Crossroads mural at the Rockefeller Center. The New York World-Telegram deemed the mural “anti-capitalist propaganda” on account of its portrayal of Marxist, pro-worker leaders. Rivera was preparing to alter the mural to end the controversy, but Shahn urged him not to give in, circulating a petition amongst the workers stating that they would quit if Rivera yielded. “Rather than mutilate the conception,” Rivera wrote, influenced by Shahn’s urgent petitioning, “I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety.”

In 1935, Shahn was hired as a photographer by the Resettlement Administration to join artists like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in documenting the desolation wrought by The Great Depression. His photographs of sharecroppers, laborers, and farmers personify the barren landscape of poverty. After the success of his work for the Resettlement Administration, Shahn was regularly commissioned by government agencies to create politically relevant art. He was also active in academia and his collected lectures The Shape of Content (1960) are still widely referenced in the art world. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Gallery, London; and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; among others.