Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents Ben Shahn
November 1947 Reviewed by Nancy Newhall Editors Note: Retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Directed by James Thrall Soby. Until January 4. Why do the paintings of Ben Shahn appeal so strongly to photographers? Is it because he uses a camera to make the sketches from life on which he bases his paintings? Many other painters do the same without arousing photographers to such a pitch of excitement. Or because he made a brief but important contribution, along with Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, to the early style of the FSA photographic project His work with the Leica is good but not as distinguished as Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. Shahn is not a "photographic" painter in the usual art-critic sense of a dead and embalmed illusion. His nervously incised contours are far more important than chiaroscuro, which he uses only for dramatic effect. His color is free, as pink automobiles and crimson tree trunks abundantly testify, and recently, as in the ghostly gold in Cherubs and Children 1944 and the strange compelling scarlet of The Red Stairway 1944, it becomes a dominant theme in itself. A comparison of his original photographic perception with the finished painting reveals how much better he is as painter than as photographer. In his photographs he does not work for the most expressive moment; he snaps an interesting but incomplete idea, usually an architectural setting with suggested placements of figures. His painting is to him what the climax of a series is to the miniaturist or the print visualized on the final ground glass image to those who use large cameras. Why then does he arouse such photographic emotions? First of all, I shirk, because he deals with the same problems, themes, sod concepts as we do. He has not evaded actuality but penetrated it. He uses its very look and feel--I almost said sound and smell--in translating it into intensely poetic images. He sees people in the streets and backlots and fields with the same deep perspectives and split second tensions as Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. He uses architecture and signs as Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and many other photographers do. He has an uncanny sense of detail and its connotations. James Soby, in his valuable monograph, first of the American series of Penguin Modern Painters, ($1.25), quotes Shahn as saying, "There's a difference in the way a twelve-dollar coat wrinkles from the way a seventy-five dollar coat wrinkles, and that has to be right." Soby comments on the feet in his paintings--and once you have noticed them, they become an obsession--children's sneakers, working boots, the middle aged shoes in that weird dance of the Churchgoers. Not only the clothing, but the outline and action of every figure is that of an individual we have been. Perhaps his most amazing use of detail is more cinematic than photographic, though it can be found in the work of people as apparently diverse as Weston and Cartier-Bresson. This might be dubbed the psychological time-bomb: in Pacific Landscape 1945, a canvas full of insistent pebbles make you blink before you discover a man lying on the beach and gradually realize there blood seeping from him. There is a variation on this effect that resembles a double-exposure: in Ohio Magic 1945, we see a street with a bus on it and in a corner window a boy looking out. Then vague shadows materialize like a frightening dream into an implacable brick wall. Such interchange of themes and concepts between painting and photography is not new. It has a lineage extending back through the camera obscura and the camera lucida to the Renaissance, when painters began employing such instruments to help them construct the deep perspectives consonant with the expanding world of their time. Since 1839 many painters have made creative use of photographic concepts--Degas of instantaneous photography, Marcel Duchamp of stroboscopic, for example--and many more, such as Gauguin and Toulose-Lautrec, have worked from photographs. This vast and exciting field is still shunned by all but one or two art-historians and art critics. The insult still contained in the word "photographic" when hurled at a painter implies the same kind of creative impotence and superficial imitations as the word "pictorial." James Soby, Director of the Shahn exhibition, is to be congratulated for the role he has long played in helping establish a more profound evaluation of the relation between painting and photography. - Nancy Newhall
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