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Ben Shahn's murals for the Bronx Central Post Office

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1996 by Diana L. Linden

Shahn was born in 1898 in Kovno, Lithuania, a large Jewish community and theological center.(1) The government persecuted Shahn's father, Joshua, for his political actions as a socialist, and in 1906 the family emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn, New York, like so many other Eastern European Jews. As a teenager Shahn was apprenticed to a lithographer and studied at the Educational Alliance, the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design, all in New York City.(2) He made the artist's customary pilgrimage to Europe in 1924 and 1925 and then lived abroad for two years beginning in 1927. Lacking his own artistic style, he borrowed the brushwork and colors of the impressionists, and then Matisse's flat, bold areas of color. But he later recalled:

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I didn't know either where I stood when I came back to America in 1929. I had seen all the right pictures and read all the right books....But still it didn't add up to anything. Here I am, I said to myself, [thirty-one] years old, the son of a carpenter. I like stories and people. The French school is not for me. Vollard is wrong for me. If I am to be a painter I must show the world how it looks through my eyes, not theirs.(3)

In 1930 Shahn created a series of individual and group portraits of the participants in the Dreyfus affair of 1894, when the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) of the French army was falsely found guilty of treason. This series announced Shahn's commitment to chronicling events of social injustice and political importance. In 1931 and 1932 he painted a series entitled The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti relating to the two Italian-American radicals executed for murder, perhaps wrongly; and the following year he depicted the trial of Thomas J. Mooney, a minor labor leader, charged with allegedly bombing a parade. These last two series mark the debut of the mature artist and are related to the Bronx murals by the social concerns of their subject matter, the simplified colors, and the use of outline to define bold shapes.

An important milestone for Shahn as a social realist painter was to assist the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) on the ill-fated mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1933.(4) In this capacity Shahn was not only one of the few New Deal artists to learn the fresco technique, but he also experienced firsthand the ramifications of painting politically and socially sensitive subjects.

In May 1933 the well-connected artist George Biddle wrote to his former classmate Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposing that the New Deal concept of make-work be extended to unemployed artists.(5) Roosevelt was receptive, and under his administration America's first sustained program of Federal art patronage was realized. The Mexican government's sponsorship of art offered a model. Four projects were created, each with its own policies and agenda: the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Works Progress Administrations Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), and the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture (known as the Section).(6) The Section, which commissioned Shahn's Bronx murals, was established in October 1934 to "secure the best possible art for the embellishment of government buildings."(7)

A competition for the Bronx commission, which was the Section's first in New York City, drew 189 proposals.(8) Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, jointly sketched the winning thirteen-panel suite inspired by Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED]. He called the mural Resources of America and envisioned it connecting the people of the Bronx with their fellow workers across the country. As Shahn said, "Having experienced America myself, I decided to those people who are as provincial as only city people can be, to show them the best and scope of America."(9)

Scanning the completed mural in the Bronx General Post Office one experiences the rhythm of work in the 1930s. The men and one woman, black and white, all have their heads bowed, too busy to look up and greet their Bronx audience. The panels are united by an over-all tawny rust tone. The impression is of worker solidarity that transcends the varying occupations and regions of America.

The artist intimates the country's progress and future by pairing panels to show the people and processes involved in transforming raw materials into finished products. A panel on the northeast wall shows a woman working in the textile industry [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED]. The spools and bars act as a visual barrier between us and her. In a preparatory study [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED] Shahn emphasized hand labor and left out the machinery and other signs of heavy industry evident in the finished panel. In the more romantic study, we are keenly aware of the woman's strong, agile hands grasping bundles of thread.(10) On the opposite wall is the woman's counterpart - a man tending a loom [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VIII OMITTED]. He is surrounded by a sprawling complex of red-brick mill buildings, and his large, meaty hands simultaneously plunge into the threads of the loom and the picture plane. The many fine lines representing threads that extend outward from the loom are also artfully reminiscent of the golden shafts that radiate from the figures in Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation.

Ben Shahn's murals for the Bronx Central Post Office

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1996 by Diana L. Linden

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