Lithuanian-born American painter, muralist, photographer, and graphic artist; the most committed social realist of mid-century American art and the artist who most fully connected the New Deal mural tradition to the labor movement, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the civil-liberties politics of the Depression and Cold War eras.
Shahn emigrated with his family from Kovno (now Kaunas) to Brooklyn in 1906, trained as a lithographer's apprentice, studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and returned to New York in the early 1930s, where he shared a studio with Walker Evans. The work that made his reputation was the Sacco and Vanzetti series (1931–32) — twenty-three gouache paintings on the 1927 execution of the two Italian-American anarchists, exhibited at the Downtown Gallery to immediate attention. The paintings are flat, poster-like, deliberately un-virtuosic: Shahn wanted the political content legible, not dissolved into painterly surface. The series caught the eye of Diego Rivera, who hired Shahn as an assistant on the Rockefeller Center mural (the one Rockefeller destroyed for including Lenin's portrait).
From 1935 to 1938 Shahn worked as a photographer and designer for the Farm Security Administration under Roy Stryker, producing thousands of photographs of rural poverty across the American South and Midwest — a body of work parallel to Lange's and Evans's, though Shahn's FSA photographs were less known during his lifetime and have been substantially rediscovered since. His New Deal murals — for the Bronx Central Post Office (1938–39), the Social Security Building in Washington (1940–42), and the Federal Housing community of Roosevelt, New Jersey (1937–38) — are among the best surviving examples of public art from the period.
The postwar work shifted from oil and tempera to posters, book illustration, and graphic design — Shahn became one of the finest American poster artists of the mid-century, producing iconic images for the CIO-PAC, the Office of War Information, and the nuclear-disarmament movement. His 1957 Lucky Dragon series, on the Japanese fishing boat contaminated by the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb test, is one of the important anti-nuclear artworks. His Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as The Shape of Content (1957), are a short, lucid defense of representational art with social purpose against the dominance of Abstract Expressionism — and, more broadly, a defense of content as inseparable from form, not an embarrassment to it.
Shahn is on the graph because his work — from Sacco and Vanzetti through the FSA photographs to the anti-nuclear posters — is the most sustained visual record of American left-labor politics across the New Deal, the Second World War, and the early Cold War, and because The Shape of Content is a rare artist's defense of art as having something to say.