LaborFest

1 week ago

Ben Shahn’s Social Realist Art Feels Relevant Again in Landmark Survey
An old master of the Great Depression painted a portrait of America as it still may be.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/arts/design/ben-shahn-jewish-museum.html

A painting of a gallery at the Whitney Museum shows sculptures from the annual survey of the nation’s artists. The walls surrounding the modern works are covered in Ben Shahn’s own realist paintings.
Ben Shahn, “Contemporary American Sculpture,” 1940, from a retrospective at the Jewish Museum. The artist depicts his own realist paintings surrounding modern sculptures.Credit…Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via Art Institute of Chicago
Blake Gopnik.png
By Blake Gopnik
Published May 29, 2025
Updated May 30, 2025, 9:54 a.m. ET
With some artists, there’s one work that seems to capture their essential achievement.

In the long-overdue retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, the entire artistic project of the American painter Ben Shahn comes clear in a single fascinating painting from 1940 called “Contemporary American Sculpture.” It depicts a gallery at the Whitney Museum hosting sculptures from that January’s survey of the nation’s artists — except that Shahn, left out of that survey, reimagines the walls surrounding those stylized modern works as covered in his own realist paintings.

Those show scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression — decrepit workers’ housing; a farmer by his shack; poor Black women at a welfare hospital — depicted as though the Whitney’s walls have been pierced to reveal the all-too-real world out beyond. It recalls how Renaissance murals pierced church walls to let in the more-real world of the Bible.

“Contemporary American Sculpture” captures what’s at stake in the most potent works in “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” as this revelatory survey is called. Those works use the time-honored art of painting to make the modern world, and its signature troubles, as present as Shahn can manage. The effect is gripping, and feels utterly relevant for the troubled moment we are living in now.
For a decade or so on either side of World War II, Shahn’s achievements made him an art star, earning him a major show at the Museum of Modern Art and honors including a place in the American Pavilion of the 1954 Venice Biennale, shared with the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning.
Image
Painting of three men with hats near the railroad tracks, facing the viewer. Voting posters are behind them.
Ben Shahn, “Scotts Run, West Virginia,” 1937. During the Great Depression, Shahn felt sympathy for Americans suffering the deprivations he grew up with. (This painting was based on a photograph he took.)Credit…Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via The Jewish Museum
But it was de Kooning and his ilk who went on to dominate the art world; as Cold War reaction took hold, Shahn, a dedicated leftist, saw a slow but unbroken decline in his critical fortunes. There has barely been an uptick since. The Jewish Museum show is Shahn’s first notable survey in the United States since one at the same museum in 1976. Featuring 175 artworks and objects, photos by Shahn and his peers as well as illuminating ephemera, it was organized abroad, at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where it was a big hit in 2023; the curator Laura Katzman had to work hard to find an American museum to take it.

Shahn was raised in immigrant Brooklyn, where his family, who were Jewish, had landed in 1906, when he was 8. They were fleeing deprivation, antisemitism and oppression in their native Lithuania, then under Russian rule. Shahn’s father, a socialist and anti-czarist, had been forced into exile in Siberia. In the United States, the Shahns still had such struggles that young Ben had to drop out of high school to help fund the household. He landed in a lithographer’s workshop, where he mastered the fundamentals of visual art.

But his career as an artist took a while to jell, as he attended various courses in various places — New York University, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., the City College of New York. In the 1920s, Shahn, supported by a hard-working wife, Tillie Goldstein, was able to take in the high points of old master and modern art across Europe. (He arranged a meeting with Picasso but got cold feet and called it off.)

By 1933, Shahn was back in New York, assisting the great Diego Rivera on his infamous mural for Rockefeller Center, soon hacked off the wall because of its portrait of Lenin. Unlike his mentor, Shahn never quite subscribed to communist doctrine, though he shared the movement’s egalitarian aims.

For a solo show at the prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York, that same year, Shahn portrayed scenes from the saga of Tom Mooney, a labor leader falsely imprisoned for a 1916 bombing, who wasn’t released until 1939.

If the images in the survey feel more like news than comment, that’s partly because we can sense the press photos Shahn used as his sources. Though his paintings themselves aren’t close to photorealistic — his technique can be potently slapdash — their subjects have the verve of seeming caught on the fly. His image of two perjurers who helped convict Mooney has the strange perspective of a wide-angle lens, as does its newspaper source, on view at the Jewish Museum alongside other documentation that gives insight into Shahn’s art.
Image
A new photograph shows two men in suits, sitting and handcuffed in a courthouse. One, at left, has a large handlebar mustache.
A 1923 news photograph showing Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) handcuffed to Nicola Sacco, in a courthouse in Dedham, Mass. Shahn used it as his source for a painting in the Jewish Museum show.Credit…via Boston Public Library
Image
Painting of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, handcuffed, in 1931.
Ben Shahn, “Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco,” 1931-32, gouache on paper. This painting retains the tight cropping of its source photograph.Credit…Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via Museum of Modern Art
The exhibition includes an earlier series on the controversial 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants executed for murder despite flimsy evidence. Shahn’s painting of the two handcuffed men is cropped weirdly tight; we see that it echoes a source photo that had been cropped the same way, to save space on the printed page. Shahn borrows the feel of a photograph’s direct observation to make his painted subjects seem more directly observed by us.

In the mid-1930s, he took up the camera himself, as part of a New Deal project to document Depression hardships. His photographs in this show stand up fine against nearby ones by famous colleagues like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Shahn used them as sources for the New Deal murals he was soon making — the show mostly includes them as studies — and then for many of his later paintings.

The vast majority of photographs in Shahn’s day were black-and-white and very small. They couldn’t have the sheer presence of scenes at life scale, in full color. That had been the territory once staked out in the “history paintings” of the European old masters; in the best works in the show, Shahn channels the potent “reality effect” of those paintings, but uses it to capture distinctly modern subjects and social ills, and the modern look of a photographed world.
Image
A man wearing a hat with his head in his hands and a white shirt sits on a wooden splintered bench with a newspaper, its banner headline reading “Dust Storm.”
Ben Shahn, “Years of Dust,” 1936, poster. Shahn was a fierce proponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.Credit…via Museum of Modern Art
That achievement comes especially clear in the colorful posters he made during World War II for the American Office of War Information, which show figures, at life size or larger, suffering under the Nazis and their partners. Those figures might as well be Christian martyrs on the walls of a Renaissance church. (Shahn reworked one poster about Nazi slave labor into a painting called “1943 AD,” in which a stretch of barbed wire becomes a crown of thorns on one of the enslaved.)

Shahn’s vision was too potent for the Office of War Information: It seems to have released only two of his posters.

A bit later in the 1940s, working for the Congress of Industrial Organizations — a major confederation of unions — he created other posters that used the same effects to champion causes such as colorblind hiring and voting rights. Welders — one Black and one white — loom above us in this show, as if they were just the other side of the museum wall.
Image
Black and white photograph of two men in shirtsleeves, welders’ glasses and welding helmets.
A photograph by Alfred T. Palmer, showing two welders, October 1941. Shahn used this photograph as the source of a poster, changing the race of one of the welders to Black.Credit…The Jewish Museum

Poster that echoes the two welders, one Black and one white, with a building’s frame seen in the reflection of his glasses.
Ben Shahn, “For Full Employment After the War, Register, Vote,” 1944.Credit…Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via The Jewish Museum
Unfortunately, in the decade or so before his death in 1969, Shahn could seem more interested in modern aesthetics than in modern people and their plights. His pictures became palimpsests of allusive symbols, reheating modern styles from Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. Toward the end of this show, we miss the immediacy of Shahn’s earlier pictures, with their close ties to an observed world. Instead, we’re offered illustrations of moral themes and spiritual subjects that can read like vaporous musings.

What Shahn couldn’t have realized, as he turned away from his potent visions of the 1930s and 40s, was that they would find new purchase almost a century later, when once again we face issues of racial injustice, and what our nation might do about it, and prosecutions that can seem to serve politics, not justice.

Back in 1933, in an essay for the Downtown Gallery show, Rivera called Shahn “magnificent,” and said his paintings captured “a complete portrait” of the reality Shahn had grown up in. At the Jewish Museum, a century later, they seem to offer a portrait of our reality, too.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Through Oct. 12, the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.
A correction was made on May 29, 2025: An earlier version of this review gave an incorrect date for the artist Ben Shahn’s exhibition at the Downtown Gallery. It was 1933, not 1939. It also misstated the date of Tom Mooney’s release from jail. It happened in 1939, not 1933. The review also misstated the frequency of publication of the artist’s New Deal photographs. They were widely disseminated, not rarely shown. … See MoreSee Less

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

A ‘Chicano Hieronymus Bosch’ Has an Unflinching Vision of America
Vincent Valdez depicts moments from the country’s past and present that many would prefer to forget.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/arts/design/vincent-valdez-artist-massmoca-mural.html
Aruna D’Souza
By Aruna D’Souza
Reporting from North Adams, Mass.
May 23, 2025
It’s easy to see why so many people describe Vincent Valdez’s work as prophetic. Take “Requiem,” an installation he made in collaboration with his partner, the artist Adriana Corral, centered on a bronze sculpture of a dying bald eagle lying pitiably on its back.

When it was first shown at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in 2019, it seemed to precisely capture the mood of many Americans who were fearful for the future of the country under the first Trump administration. But it was actually created two years before the 2016 election.

Likewise, “The City,” Valdez’s 30-foot-long oil painting depicting a modern-day gathering of men, women and even a baby dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods. Shown in 2018, it could have been a direct response to the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Except it, too, was made before the rally took place.

“I don’t have a crystal ball in my studio,” Valdez, 47, said in a recent telephone conversation from his studio in Houston. (He splits his time between Texas and Los Angeles.) “I’m just keeping my eyes open, especially at a moment when more and more people find it easier to just turn away from the world.”

Now museum audiences are having a chance to assess the full sweep of Valdez’s vision of America — a record of “love, struggle and survival in 21st-century America,” he calls it. His midcareer retrospective, “Just a Dream …,” opens at Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Mass., on May 25; it is the second stop for the exhibition, which debuted at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) last November.

Visitors to Mass MoCA will find meticulously rendered drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, etchings, videos and even a painted truck that home in on some of the most indelible and poignant images of Chicano (or Mexican American) and Latino experience. Valdez calls his devotion to a realist style and traditional art-making techniques a form of “high-definition vision.”
ImageA view of a museum gallery. In the center is a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck repainted in vivid, dark colors.
An installation view of “Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream …” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The survey includes a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck that Valdez transformed into a complex historical account of a crucial moment in Los Angeles history.Credit…via Vincent Valdez and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Photo by Peter Molick
His subjects include exhausted, defeated boxers; the funeral of his best friend John R. Holt Jr., an Iraq War veteran who took his life in 2009 because of PTSD; televised scenes of American politics and pop culture (Oliver North’s trial, Michael Jordan’s slam dunk contest); victims of racist violence against Mexican Americans; and inspirational figures from the Latino community.

Valdez’s socially engaged art finds its focus in the often overlooked presence of Chicanos, a vision planted when he was only 9 years old, and already working alongside the artist Alex Rubio on murals around San Antonio, his hometown. His commitment to painting — as well as to the historical research demanded by these compositions — was so passionate that his high school teachers let him cut class to create murals in the school cafeteria, figuring it was the best way to keep him engaged in school. He had taught himself to draw the human form via television, asking his mother to pause the VCR so he could trace the figures on paper.
Image

Valdez working on a sketch in his studio in Houston.Credit…Ariana Gomez for The New York Times
Image

Valdez preparing to color a print, “Heard Ten Thousand Whisperin’ and Nobody Listenin’.”Credit…Ariana Gomez for The New York Times
He arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, where his penchant for anatomically precise drawings called to mind art from the Renaissance, or the 20th-century social realism of George Bellows and Paul Cadmus — decidedly out of sync with the abstract vibe.

When Valdez began working on “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!” (2001), some of his teachers balked at its frank depiction of racist and xenophobic violence, he said. The painting portrays the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, in which American servicemen attacked hundreds of predominantly Mexican American men. “I remember an instructor saying, ‘You’re never going to have a successful career if you continue to work with controversial and confrontational subject matter like this,’” he recalled.

A painting portraying the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. Several fistfights dominate the canvas.
Vincent Valdez, “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!,” 2002, oil on canvas.Credit…via Vincent Valdez and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Photo by Elon Schoenholz
That instructor was wrong. The painting soon caught the eye of Cheech Marin, the actor, comedian, art collector and founder of the Cheech, a center for Chicano art and culture at the Riverside Art Museum in California. On a tip from an art adviser, he traveled to San Antonio to see it. Valdez, who had moved back into his parents’ home after college, pulled it out from under his mother’s bed, Marin said in an interview. “I took one look at it and said, ‘This is great, I’ll buy it’ — it was as simple as that.”

The Museums Special Section
Black Cowboys Ride Again: Museums have taken up the cause of dispelling the perception of a whites-only West.
A Symbol of Hope in St. Louis: The 19th-century Old Courthouse is set to reopen in May after a $27.5 million renovation.
A Museum and the Sea: Rising sea levels are forcing the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut to address the sustainability of its campus.
Ai Weiwei’s World: A show now at the Seattle Art Museum is the largest in the U.S. in the 40-year career of the renowned Chinese artist.
More on Museums: Artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
The painting also captivated the musician Ry Cooder, who at the time was working on “Chavez Ravine,” a 2005 Grammy-nominated concept album inspired by the story of a longstanding Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles demolished in the 1950s. Real estate developers promised public housing; residents, forcibly removed from their homes, got Dodger Stadium instead.

Valdez, pointing to a vase full of paint chippings from finished projects over the years, has been collecting paint chips from all his projects since 2008.Credit…Ariana Gomez for The New York Times
Image

The musician Ry Cooder has compared Valdez to Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Dürer.Credit…Ariana Gomez for The New York Times
I
A photo of a hand holding a paintbrush and working on a mostly turquoise and blue painting.
Valdez calls his devotion to a realist style and traditional art-making techniques a form of “high-definition vision.”Credit…Ariana Gomez for The New York Times
Cooder had the idea of creating a painted vehicle — a homage to Chicano lowrider car culture — that would narrate the history of the event. He found Valdez’s phone number and began leaving messages, to no avail, he said in a recent interview. (“I never bothered calling back because I assumed it was a friend pulling a stunt,” Valdez said with a laugh.)

When Cooder did finally get through, he convinced Valdez to move to California. Over two years there, the painter transformed a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck into a complex historical account of a crucial moment in Los Angeles history.

“He’s kind of a Chicano Hieronymus Bosch, or Albrecht Dürer,” Cooder said. “He has the technique, but he also brings tremendous imagination, beautiful colors and a sense of action and movement.”
Image
A painting of a man with his left arm around his wife, standing in front of a sheet hanging on a clothesline, with a radio and a cactus in the foreground.
Vincent Valdez, “People of the Sun (Grandma and Grandpa Santana)," 2018, oil on canvas.Credit…via Vincent Valdez and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Photo by Peter Molick

Portraiture plays a central role in Valdez’s practice. “People of the Sun / El Gente de la Sol (the Santanas),” from 2018, depicting his grandparents in front of a clothesline, took three years. “It’s one of the very, very few paintings that I am content with,” Valdez said. “It speaks about the labor and the toil and the determination of creating that better life and situation in America, so that your offspring have a better way forward.”

If paintings like “The City” offer up a troubling vision of America, Valdez’s continuing series “The New Americans” points to what it could be. (“The City,” “The New Americans” and a 2018 series titled “Dream Baby Dream,” showing mourners at Muhammad Ali’s funeral, are part of a trilogy, “The Beginning Is Near.”)

“I want to paint Americans in the 21st century who, in my eyes, are still fighting the good fight, not for power, not for profit, not for fame, but because it’s still simply the right thing to do,” he said. Subjects include Sennett Devermont, a legal rights activist known as Mr. Checkpoint and founder of the AFTP (“Always Film the Police”) Foundation; his partner and sometime collaborator Adriana Corral; and the jazz musician and music education advocate Wynton Marsalis.

The artist Teresita Fernández, another subject, has been a longtime admirer. “There is a particular, very sharp sensitivity to the way Vince brings power to the act of looking,” she said in an email. “He’s very tenderly seeing layers of personhood, revealing a second, deeper layer of portraiture that’s much more subtle and intimate, beyond broad ideas of identity.”

A painter, seen from above, works on a canvas taller than him in his studio.
Valdez works on his in-progress painting “The New Americans (Adriana)” in his studio in Houston.Credit…Ariana Gomez for The New York Times
His approach — showing both the lows and the highs of American experience — seems to resonate with museumgoers. Patricia Restrepo, a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and an organizer of the exhibition, said that attendance there included a huge number of first-time visitors and multigenerational families, many Latino.

“Parents would bring in their young children and really engage in uncomfortable and critical conversation about the ways in which white supremacy continues to operate and continues to harm them,” she said.

“I think Vincent really is able to usher in difficult conversations through the strategy of beauty and technical mastery,” she added.

Not everyone is so comfortable when confronted with the art. When “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!” was shown at the Smithsonian almost 20 years ago, Valdez recalled that curators insisted on installing it behind a curtain.
Image
A 30-foot-wide painting of people dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods at night.
“The City,” by Valdez, is a 30-foot-wide oil painting depicting a modern-day gathering of men, women and even a baby dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods.Credit…via Vincent Valdez and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Photo by Peter Molick
And when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin bought “The City,” the museum kept it in storage for two years while curators considered how to display it. When they put it on view, it was hung behind a wall with content warnings for visitors who might have been troubled to see such a frank depiction of the K.K.K. Though the museum was criticized by some for its handling of the presentation, no significant protest materialized.

That painting developed out of Valdez’s study of Texas history, during which he learned that between 1848 and 1928, 547 Mexican Americans were lynched in Texas and California. The piece was also informed by his interest in the artist Philip Guston, who depicted Klan figures in his work during the 1960s and ’70s, and by his own unsettling encounter with a K.K.K. rally as a teenager.

“I didn’t make the painting to be controversial or have a shock value,” Valdez said. “My goal was to create a 30-foot mirror of America, to recreate the kinds of tensions I felt in the air outside my studio.”
Image
A painting of a man in a Western shirt and western hat wearing only one shoe.
Vincent Valdez, “The Strangest Fruit (3),” 2013, oil on canvas.Credit…via Vincent Valdez and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Photo by Mark Menjivar
Image
A painting of a shirtless man with a shaved head and tattoos all over his chest, arms and face.
“So Long, Mary Ann” is named after a Leonard Cohen song. Credit…via Vincent Valdez and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Photo by Peter Molick
He had tackled the subject with an earlier series, “Strangest Fruit,” depicting Chicano men — modeled by family and friends — in poses suggestive of victims, hanging against blank backgrounds like the martyred saints of the Renaissance. “No one was bothered by those paintings,” he noted. “People are more comfortable seeing the victims of violence than the perpetrators.”

Both CAMH and Mass MoCA made the decision to present “The City” straightforwardly; at Mass MoCA, it is one of the first things visitors see. “Vincent is unflinching,” said Denise Markonish, who co-curated “Just a Dream …” “We, as a museum, should be too.”

The payoff of close looking is apparent in works like “So Long, Mary Ann,” Valdez’s searing 2019 portrait, whose name alludes to a Leonard Cohen song about heartbreak. It shows a young man — shirtless, with a shaved head, tattoos covering his body. But push past the surface, past the current discourse around tattooed Latino gang members, and his expression is mournful, tender and vulnerable. Look closer still, and you will see a tiny cross reflected in the young man’s eye.

It’s this attention that makes Valdez a singular artist, Markonish said. “He paints a picture of his grandparents with as much care as he paints the Klan,” she said. “In taking the time to render these things, he’s confronting them in a really intimate way. He’s doing himself what he is asking us to do, which is not look away.”

Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream …

May 25, 2025, to April 5, 2026. Mass MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, Mass.; 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org.

30-Foot Painting of the K.K.K. Puts a Museum to the Test
July 16, 2018
Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art and is the author of “Whitewalling: Art, Race & Politics in 3 Acts.” In 2021 she was awarded a Rabkin Prize for Art Journalism. … See MoreSee Less