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Chapter 10 Modern? American? Jew? Museums and Exhibitions of Ben Shahn’s Late Paintings Diana L. Linden The year 1998 marked the centennial of the birth of artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969). Coupled with the approach of the millennium, which many museums celebrated by surveying the cultural production of the twentieth century, the centennial offered a perfect opportunity to mount a major exhibition of Shahn’s work (the last comprehensive exhibition had taken place at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1976).1 The moment was also propitious because a renewed interest in narrative and figurative art and in the social history of art encouraged scholarly and popular appreciation of Ben Shahn, whose reputation within the history of American art had been eclipsed for many decades by the attention given to the abstract expressionists . The Jewish Museum responded in 1998 with Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, organized by the museum’s curator Susan Chevlowe, with the abstract expressionism scholar Stephen Polcari. The exhibition traveled to the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania and closed at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in 1999. Smaller Shahn exhibitions then in the planning stage (although not scheduled to open during the centennial year) were to focus on selected aspects of Shahn’s oeuvre: the Fogg Museum was to present his little-known New York photographs of the 1930s in relationship to his paintings, and the Jersey City Museum intended to exhibit his career-launching series, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32).2 Knowing this, Chevlowe chose to focus on the later years of Shahn’s career and on his lesser-known easel paintings of the post–World War II era. In so doing, Chevlowe challenged viewers to expand their understanding of both the artist and his place in twentieth-century American art.3 In the textbook version of art history, the 1940s and 1950s are known for the triumph of abstract expressionism, from which Shahn is normally excluded. Similarly, most art museums today do not display works by Shahn alongside those of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark 198 Diana L. Linden Rothko, and many scholars do not acknowledge that Shahn worked concurrently with them.4 This ‘‘triumph of American painting,’’ to use Irving Sandler’s term, implies that in the postwar period, realists like Shahn either gave up the brush or became irrelevant, as reflected in most museum exhibitions .5 But in her foreword to the exhibition catalogue, the director of The Jewish Museum, Joan Rosenbaum, highlighted the heretofore forgotten commonalities between Shahn and the abstract painters of the 1940s and 1950s, proposing that the artist’s mythic and allegorical paintings of the post–World War II era shared with other American artists a response to the traumas of the period, including the Holocaust, nuclear age, and Cold War. Like them, Shahn struggled to find an artistic vocabulary to express, rather than merely document, such experiences.6 Nevertheless, Shahn has been presented increasingly in the context of ‘‘Jewish art and artists.’’ Exhibitions of Shahn’s work have been instrumental in defining his position within the history of twentieth-century American art, whether at its center during his early career or at its margins during his later years. Whereas at The Jewish Museum, Common Man, Mythic Vision attempted to reinscribe Shahn within the history of postwar American art, the Detroit Institute of Arts marketed Shahn as a Jewish artist, an identification that Shahn himself refused. This essay explores how this exhibition, in two different museums, shaped expectations of Shahn’s work. I draw upon my experience as an essayist for the exhibition catalogue; participant in one of two scholars’ forums at The Jewish Museum during the planning stage; trainer of docents at the DIA; and speaker during the show’s run there. While intimately familiar with the exhibition, I had no control over its content . Indeed, mine was the only catalogue essay to deal with works that predate the postwar easel paintings at the heart of the exhibition.7 Ben Shahn and New York’s Museums No single museum lays sole claim to launching and supporting Shahn’s long career. Nor is there just one repository for the work of this prodigious and multitalented artist. Shahn was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration/Resettlement Administration; a muralist under the auspices of federal art projects (and one of the few New Deal muralists to work in true fresco, which he learned while serving...

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