Download or read book Ben Shahn s New Deal Murals written by Diana L. Linden and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Ben Shahn’s New Deal murals (1933–43) in the context of American Jewish history, labor history, and public discourse. Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn learned fresco painting as an assistant to Diego Rivera in the 1930s and created his own visually powerful, technically sophisticated, and stylistically innovative artworks as part of the New Deal Arts Project’s national mural program. InBen Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene author Diana L. Linden demonstrates that Shahn mined his Jewish heritage and left-leaning politics for his style and subject matter, offering insight into his murals’ creation and their sometimes complicated reception by officials, the public, and the press. In four chapters, Linden presents case studies of select Shahn murals that were created from 1933 to 1943 and are located in public buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri. She studies Shahn’s famous untitled fresco for the Jersey Homesteads—a utopian socialist cooperative community populated with former Jewish garment workers and funded under the New Deal—Shahn’s mural for the Bronx Central Post Office, a fresco Shahn proposed to the post office in St. Louis, and a related one-panel easel painting titled The First Amendment located in a Queens, New York, post office. By investigating the role of Jewish identity in Shahn’s works, Linden considers the artist’s responses to important issues of the era, such as President Roosevelt’s opposition to open immigration to the United States, New York’s bustling garment industry and its labor unions, ideological concerns about freedom and liberty that had signifcant meaning to Jews, and the encroachment of censorship into American art. Linden shows that throughout his public murals, Shahn literally painted Jews into the American scene with his subjects, themes, and compositions. Readers interested in Jewish American history, art history, and Depression-era American culture will enjoy this insightful volume.
Download or read book Ben Shahn written by Frances K. Pohl and published by Austin : University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1989-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first, most intense years of the Cold War (1947–1954), New Deal liberals often found themselves in great disfavor. Ben Shahn's experience presents something of a paradox, however, since his paintings appealed in different ways to both liberals and conservatives. Blacklisted by CBS during the McCarthy era and yet, ironically, incorporated into presidential "campaigns of truth" aimed at improving the U.S. image abroad, Ben Shahn is a pivotal figure, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent in this highly polarized moment in American history. In this pathbreaking study, Frances Pohl traces the political and artistic struggles Ben Shahn became embroiled in as he tried to remain a socially concerned artist during the early Cold War period. She shows how he rejected the argument, voiced by many Abstract Expressionists, that art and politics should not mix, yet at the same time searched for a way to depict, in universal and allegorical terms, the broad human condition rather than simply specific instances of injustice. Perhaps most important, she makes critical connections between U.S. social and political history and the art it provoked, thus illuminating both the later career of Ben Shahn and the Cold War era in American cultural history.
Download or read book Ben Shahn Paintings written by James Thrall Soby and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Deal Murals of Ben Shahn written by Diana Louise Linden and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Common Man Mythic Vision written by Susan Chevlowe and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the long and varied career of the great American Social Realist painter Ben Shahn, featuring striking reproductions of paintings, begins with his well-known Depression-era works and goes on to include an appreciation of his lesser-known later paintings. UP.
Download or read book Ben Shahn written by Frances Kathryn Pohl and published by Pomegranate. This book was released on 1993 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BEN SHAHN offers a comprehensive look at the art work of one of the leading social realists of our time. The book includes pieces done in the 1930s depicting the effects of the Depression, urban decay, labor strikes & poverty. Brilliant posters created for the Office of War Information during World War II describe Shahn's work in the 1940s. The book explores the artist's post-war transition from a social realism to a "personal realism," employing allegory & symbolism. Through discussions of his political views, his struggles to maintain artistic integrity, as well as through selections of Shahn's own writings, the author weaves a compelling portrait of the man & his work. BEN SHAHN includes an extensive bibliography. Other Pomegranate books dedicated to twentieth-century American artists: CHILDE HASSAM'S NEW YORK, by Ilene Susan Fort, ISBN 1-55640-317-0, $21.95; EDWARD HOPPER'S NEW ENGLAND, by Carl Little, ISBN 1-55640-315-4, $21.95; & STEWARD DAVIS'S ABSTRACT ARGOT, by William Wilson, ISBN 1-55640-316-2.
Download or read book The Shape of Content written by Ben Shahn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A modern painter discusses meaning and form in contemporary painting and offers advice to aspiring artists."--
Download or read book Ben Shahn s American Scene written by John Raeburn and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paintings, murals, and graphics of Ben Shahn (1898-1969) have made him one of the most heralded American artists of the twentieth century, but during the 1930s he was also among the nation's premier photographers. Much of his photographic work was sponsored by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration, where his colleagues included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Ben Shahn's American Scene: Photographs, 1938 presents one hundred superb photographs from his most ambitious FSA project, a survey of small-town life in the Depression. John Raeburn's accompanying text illuminates the thematic and formal significance of individual photographs and reveals how, taken together, they address key cultural and political issues of the years leading up to World War II. Shahn's photographs highlight conflicts between traditional values and the newer ones introduced by modernity as represented by the movies, chain stores, and the tantalizing allure of consumer goods, and they are particularly rich in observation about the changes brought about by Americans' universal reliance on the automobile. They also explore the small town's standing as the nation's symbol of democratic community and expose the discriminatory social and racial practices that subverted this ideal in 1930s America.
Download or read book The People s Painter written by Cynthia Levinson and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrically told, exquisitely illustrated biography of influential Jewish artist and activist Ben Shahn “The first thing I can remember,” Ben said, “I drew.” As an observant child growing up in Lithuania, Ben Shahn yearns to draw everything he sees—and, after seeing his father banished by the Czar for demanding workers’ rights, he develops a keen sense of justice, too. So when Ben and the rest of his family make their way to America, Ben brings both his sharp artistic eye and his desire to fight for what’s right. As he grows, he speaks for justice through his art—by disarming classmates who bully him because he’s Jewish, by defying his teachers’ insistence that he paint beautiful landscapes rather than true stories, by urging the US government to pass Depression-era laws to help people find food and jobs. In this moving and timely portrait, award-winning author Cynthia Levinson and illustrator Evan Turk honor an artist, immigrant, and activist whose work still resonates today: a true painter for the people.
Download or read book New Deal Photographs of West Virginia 1934 1943 written by Betty Rivard and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upon entering the White House in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced an ailing economy in the throes of the Great Depression and rushed to transform the country through recovery programs and legislative reform. By 1934, he began to send professional photographers to the state of West Virginia to document living conditions and the effects of his New Deal programs. The photographs from the Farm Security Administration Project not only introduced “America to Americans,” exposing a continued need for government intervention, but also captured powerful images of life in rural and small town America.New Deal Photographs of West Virginia, 1934-1943 presents images of the state's northern and southern coalfields, the subsistence homestead projects of Arthurdale, Eleanor, and Tygart Valley, and various communities from Charleston to Clarksburg and Parkersburg to Elkins. With over one hundred and fifty images by ten FSA photographers, including Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, this collection is a remarkable proclamation of hardship, hope, endurance, and, above all, community. These photographs provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of West Virginians during the Great Depression and beyond.
Download or read book Modernism for the Masses written by Jody Patterson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mural renaissance swept the United States in the 1930s, propelled by the New Deal Federal Art Project and the popularity of Mexican muralism. Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, murals became a crucial site for the development of abstract painting Artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner created ambitious works for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Floyd Bennett Field Airport, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Modernism for the Masses examines the public murals (realized and unrealized) of these and other abstract painters and the aesthetic controversy, political influence, and ideological warfare that surrounded them. Jody Patterson transforms standard narratives of modernism by reasserting the significance of the 1930s and explores the reasons for the omission of the mural’s history from chronicles of American art. Beautifully illustrated with the artists’ murals and little-known archival photographs, this book recovers the radical idea that modernist art was a vital part of everyday life.
Download or read book The Social and the Real Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ben Shahn An Artist s Life written by Howard Greenfeld and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-10 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898 and emigrated to New York with his family in 1906. Trained as a lithographer, Shahn created social realist paintings of controversial subjects such as Sacco and Vanzetti. He worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, and later created his own public murals in Washington, New York, and New Jersey. In 1935, Walker Evans invited him to join the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. As a photographer, Shahn documented the Depression in the American South with Evans and Dorothea Lange. During the war years, he worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) producing propaganda posters before returning to painting. Toward the end of his life he worked as a commercial artist, taught and wrote about art, including The Biography of a Painting(1956) and The Shape of Content (1960). Howard Greenfeld's biography is the first complete life of the artist and is illustrated with 90 of his photographs, pictures, and paintings. “Howard Greenfeld’s approach scrupulously balances the personal and the political to provide a rounded portrait... gives a convincing sense of a determined individual making his mark as an immigrant in the turbulent America of depression and war, social upheaval and reaction.” — David Cohen, The New York Times
Download or read book The New Deal Fine Arts Projects written by Martin R. Kalfatovic and published by Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ...fills another important need for art researchers. New Deal art is the product of the largest publicly funded arts program in American history and as such, holds a special attraction for collectors... --ANTIQUE WEEK ...a valuable reference resource. Highly recommended for all research collections serving American history and art.--LIBRARY JOURNAL
Download or read book Ben Shahn s New York written by Ben Shahn and published by Fogg Art Museum. This book was released on 2000 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ben Shahn, painter, muralist, and graphic artist, was also a talented photographer who made documentary street photographs in New York City in the early 1930s. This book is the first to focus on his compelling New York images, showing how he used a camera to comment on many social issues of his day." "The book considers the immediate social history of Shahn's New York photographs and analyzes how his leftist politics and his interest in news photographs and film affected his photographic aesthetic. The authors assert the importance of analyzing Shahn's paintings and photographs together, explaining why the connections between the two have been ignored until now. The book reproduces not only Shahn's New York photographs but also his related paintings, prints, and drawings, and an appendix presents documents that speak to the impact of his photographic work."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Great Depression and the New Deal written by James S. Olson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for AP-focused American history high school students, this book supplies a complete quick reference source and study aide on the Great Depression and New Deal in America, covering the key themes, events, people, legislation, economics, and policies. The Great Depression and the New Deal remain key topics in American History that come up often as testing subject material. This book—comprising an introduction, encyclopedic A–Z entries, a chronology, thematic tagging, more than a dozen primary sources, Advanced Placement (AP) exam resources, and a bibliography—provides a complete resource for studying the themes, events, people, legislation, economics, and policy of the Great Depression and New Deal in America. It is ideally suited as a study resource for high school students studying to take the AP U.S. history course as well as undergraduates taking an introductory U.S. History survey course. The Great Depression and the New Deal: Key Themes and Documents supplies an easy-to-use guide to the central concepts, themes, and events of a pivotal era in American history that presents the Great Depression and New Deal in 10 thematic categories. While the focus of this book is on the AP course content itself rather than on the exam, it also features exam preparation-specific content, such as a sample documents-based essay question, a list of "Top Tips" for answering documents-based essay questions, and period-specific learning objectives that are in alignment with the new fall 2014 AP U.S. History curriculum framework.
Download or read book To Walt Whitman America written by Kenneth M. Price and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman "is America," according to Ezra Pound. More than a century after his death, Whitman's name regularly appears in political speeches, architectural inscriptions, television programs, and films, and it adorns schools, summer camps, truck stops, corporate centers, and shopping malls. In an analysis of Whitman as a quintessential American icon, Kenneth Price shows how his ubiquity and his extraordinarily malleable identity have contributed to the ongoing process of shaping the character of the United States. Price examines Whitman's own writings as well as those of writers who were influenced by him, paying particular attention to Whitman's legacies for an ethnically and sexually diverse America. He focuses on fictional works by Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor, among others. In Price's study, Leaves of Grass emerges as a living document accruing meanings that evolve with time and with new readers, with Whitman and his words regularly pulled into debates over immigration, politics, sexuality, and national identity. As Price demonstrates, Whitman is a recurring starting point, a provocation, and an irresistible, rewritable text for those who reinvent the icon in their efforts to remake America itself.
