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This is a 1960 Jazz LP “West Side Story”, on the original Contemporary Label.
About the Artist: Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)
Born in Kovno, Lithuania, Ben Shahn’s early education was informal, consisting mainly of studying passages from the Bible. Copying biblical texts as a child inspired a lifelong interest in lettering and calligraphy, and many of his compositions use words, names, and quotations as formal elements. 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. Between 1919 and 1922 he studied at New York University; the City College of New York, a free college; and the National Academy of Design. Sharing a studio in 1929 with the photographer Walker Evans stimulated Shahn’s own interest in photography; he began photographing people and street scenes, first in New York and later around the country. These photographs served as the basis for many of his prints and paintings. In 1932-1933, Shahn assisted the Mexican artist Diego Rivera on an important series of murals depicting labor and industry for New York’s Rockefeller Center. Shahn was employed by the Works Progress Administration in the mid-1930s to design a mural for a federal prison; although that project was never realized, he received many other private and public mural commissions in subsequent years. Shahn’s late works concentrate on universal religious themes–creation and the relationship between the individual and God. A print such as Alphabet of Creation reflects his personal interest in subjects from the Old Testament and Hebrew liturgy, as well as his continued interest in letters as visual elements.
One of the leading social realists of the twentieth century, Ben Shahn’s art is one of protest against injustice and prejudice. His paintings and prints address social and political issues, focusing on the poor and disenfranchised whom he portrays with sympathy. The subjects of his earliest work are victims of political injustice such as Sacco and Vanzetti. From the 1930s on, Shahn’s art has been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions in the major art museums in New York, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, and Vienna.
For a period of forty years Ben Shahn was the preeminent painter-as-critic in American art. Such was his strength in this role that he retained his prominence throughout the era that saw the rise and flowering of American Abstraction. In 1954 he shared the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Willem de Kooning. In a sense, Shahn is the summation of the entire tradition of Social Realism in our art, which reached its fullest development under federal sponsorship in the years of the Depression and World War II. In the matter of his sources as an artist one needs only to know of his beginnings as an immigrant, of his initial training as a journeyman lithographer, of his first artistic apprenticeship with Diego Rivera on the controversial Rockefeller Center mural project in New York, and of his incessant study of the artistic past–in particular the Italian muralists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. From his first conspicuous entry on the art scene with his 1932 paintings of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of the 1920s to the end of his career he was dedicated to an understanding of the social events taking place around him. What is perhaps most important in this dedication is his extraordinary skill in the translation of these events into images of symbolic power. The subject matter of social struggle, war, poverty, and politics has seldom received comparable embodiment in our art.
