The 1930s was a time of political crisis, when the specter of totalitarianism engulfed Europe and fueled fears of all kinds in the U.S. during the Great Depression. Prominent artists of the period like Ben Shahn (1898–1969) used their formidable communicative skills to highlight social strife, poverty, political injustices and the abuse of power. He employed a highly stylized form of figuration equally inspired by Social Realism and folk art, with crisp line and bold color that always delivered a sizable graphic punch.

Once again faced with the rise of intolerance, violence, and chaotic uncertainty that accompanies an authoritarian regime, artists today will need to find a new visual language to address the country’s current political situation. Perhaps Ben Shahn’s example can help. At the very least, some inspiration may be found in a comprehensive and enthralling survey at the Jewish Museum, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, on view in New York through October 26. It is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in the U.S. since 1976, which also appeared at the Jewish Museum.  

The exhibition features some 175 works in many mediums, from tempera paintings to photographs and posters, with an urgent and clear message typically aimed at rallying the public to various sociopolitical causes. Organized by guest curator Laura Katzman in collaboration with Jewish Museum curator Stephen Brown, the exhibition is a version of the retrospective that Katzman curated for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which ran from October 4, 2023 to February 26, 2024.      

The exhibition traces Shahn’s career in thematic terms with great emphasis on Shahn’s sociopolitical message points. In his distinctive visual language, he voiced his opposition to racism in all its forms, economic inequity, xenophobia, fascism, and, in later years, nuclear testing and environmental issues that remain as pertinent as ever today. Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, his distinctive style was highly fashionable and much imitated. His deft line often recalls early works by Andy Warhol and other younger artists, who were certainly influenced by Shahn in their formative years.

Born in Lithuania, then part of Russia, Shahn immigrated to the U.S. in 1906, arriving at Ellis Island along with thousands of other Jewish families escaping oppression in Eastern Europe. The plight of immigrants remained a lifelong concern for Shahn.  Still a teenager, he worked in a lithography shop where he gained technical skills and established his idiosyncratic style early on. The exhibition begins with Shahn’s series of paintings and works on paper addressing the case of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, with the large, iconic tempera on canvas work The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32), from the Whitney Museum’s collection, hung at the gallery entrance.

Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and anarchists who many believed were wrongly accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery of a shoe company in Braintree, Massachusetts. The judge and jury were apparently stacked against them, and the two were electrocuted in 1927, with evidence that the trial was a travesty of justice. Shahn used the case as an example of xenophobia, especially against Italian immigrants at the time. In our present ICE age—with daily arrests of immigrants by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement—the Sacco and Vanzetti case has stirred renewed interest among artists and the public. There is even a new Broadway-bound musical based on the story, Sacco and Vanzetti’s Divine Comedy, written by Kevin Rice, which debuted at the Wellfleet Harbor Theater in Massachusetts this summer.

During the Great Depression, Shahn worked for the Public Works of Art Project and the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency, for which he designed murals like Jersey Homesteads (1936-1938). His growing reputation as a socially conscious artist gained the admiration of art-world figures like Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and photographer Walker Evans. The latter was close friends with Shahn, who, during the ’30s, documented in photographs the harsh daily life in rural Arkansas as well as the impoverished neighborhoods of New York City, as in East Side Merchants [Lower East Side, New York City], (1936), showing a girl standing on a shop corner of a poor Jewish neighborhood. Shahn’s photographs like this and others on view are still able to elicit strong emotions and empathy without being overly sentimental. 

Shahn was tapped by the Office of War Information during World War II to design posters that would aid the war effort. The department, however, found his posters a bit too strident and not patriotic enough. Only two were mass produced, including one decrying Nazi brutality and the other showing workers surrendering to the to the Vichy government’s forced labor decree. After the war, Shahn fought against McCarthyism and other Cold War era injustices and spearheaded the global peace movement and anti-nuclear testing initiatives along with his friend and New Jersey neighbor Albert Einstein. Shahn’s immediate postwar imagery became more poetic and less didactic, as in works such as Liberation (1945), which shows children on swings flying high above the ruins of their bombed-out city. 

Shahn was at the height of his fame in 1954 when he was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, along with Willem de Kooning. The pairing wound up becoming a prescient public airing of the conflict between Abstract Expressionism and figuration, especially the more traditional and message-laden modes of visual communication that Shahn embodied. At the time, Shahn would take umbrage with artists like Robert Motherwell who dismissed his views in favor of radical formalism.  Motherwell’s stance eventually held firm as Shahn’s influence in the art world waned after the mid-1950s. Today, those disputes seem rather arcane and irrelevant considering the broader cultural, socio-political, and environmental conflicts that face artists today. 

In his later years, from the 1950s on, Shahn followed the teachings of spiritual and political leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Shahn’s reverent portraits of them are among the highlights of the exhibition. His large, striking composition, Integration Supreme Court (1963) is a poignant and paradoxical image of the all-white judges who deemed segregation unconstitutional. In his late works, Shahn also explored in depth Hebrew culture and Jewish mysticism in a very personal way, inventing a highly stylized calligraphy for rendering the Hebrew alphabet, frequently in gold leaf. 

Also late in his career, he refined his richly layered palimpsest technique, which ironically encompasses passages of gestural abstraction that echo the work of the Abstract Expressionists. Among these are some of the most resplendent pieces on view, such as Second Allegory (1953). Here, a figure wearing all black in the lower part of the composition lies prostrate on the ground while a giant hand etched in white presses down on him from the sky. A flurry of flame shapes above near the top swirl against a blazing red background. The hapless figure suggests an allegory of oppression, just as the fiery sky conveys the cataclysmic fallout from atomic bombs, which preoccupied the artist and much of the world at the time.    

Throughout his life, Shahn advocated for the importance of dissent and believed that artists should always be willing to challenge the status quo. As evidenced by this remarkable survey, Shahn remained true to his credo that nonconformity is necessary for significant artistic production as well as societal change. Conjointly with these life-long tenets, the exhibition also reveals a fundamental, yet more personal and spiritual aim that prevails to create works of transcendent beauty.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity is on view at the Jewish Museum, New York, from May 23 to October 26, 2025.