The nonconformist: Ben Shahn is honoured in a ‘homecoming’ show at New York’s Jewish Museum

“I guess I am filled with righteous indignation most of the time,” said the US artist Ben Shahn in 1966, a claim as timely as it is timeless. “And then I feel I must make a statement… Then I will raise my voice.”

Shahn (1898-1969), a big believer in the value of dissent, raised his voice and his brush to tackle the issues of his time, from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War. His paintings, murals, commercial designs and prints championed human and civil rights while confronting injustices such as discrimination and threats to freedom of expression.

A major retrospective opening this month at The Jewish Museum in New York, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, honours the artist’s lifelong activism. “Shahn’s denunciation of authoritarianism and the abuses of the powerful and the privileged make his work exceptionally relevant at this current moment,” says the art historian Laura Katzman, the exhibition’s guest curator.

The show includes 175 artworks and objects from the 1930s to the 1960s, divided into sections dedicated to Shahn’s early Social Realism; art made for the US government’s New Deal agencies; mid-1940s posters and graphics; works created during and after the Second World War; responses to McCarthyism and the Atomic Age; his support of the civil rights movement; and his later interest in spirituality and Jewish identity.

Co-curated by the Jewish Museum’s Stephen Brown, the exhibition has been adapted from the original retrospective organised by Katzman at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2023. Although the Reina Sofía was not an obvious choice of venue to spotlight a Lithuanian-born American artist, its former director, Manuel Borja-Villel, felt Shahn’s work would resonate there. The show ended up being a surprise hit. Seeing the enthusiastic response, the Jewish Museum—which lent nine works from its collection to the Madrid iteration—decided to present a version to US audiences.

Shahn has not had a retrospective in the country in almost 50 years, and the Jewish Museum was the venue of his last such show, in 1976. Brown describes this as a kind of homecoming, especially since the artist was raised and active in New York. Shahn is “one of the key Jewish immigrant artists in the history of Modern art in New York and in the United States”, Brown says.

Shahn is far less well-known now than he was during his lifetime, when his fame and popularity peaked in the 1950s and 60s. There are a few reasons why museums have not highlighted his work, including the fact that it was figurative when the art world favoured abstraction, Minimalism and Pop. The artist’s nonconformity may have also got in the way. “Aspects of Shahn’s work can be political, and he was an activist,” Katzman says. “Many museums, often concerned with neutrality, are not always comfortable dealing with political artists.”

Organising On Nonconformity has also been a logistical challenge, since many of the artist’s important works are missing, lost or in private hands. The show notably includes loans from more than 30 institutional and private collections.

Several works will only go on view at the Jewish Museum following their rediscovery, including a buon fresco fragment titled Harvesting Wheat (1941). Shahn learned fresco techniques from the Mexican artist Diego Rivera and created significant murals of his own, but they are nearly impossible to incorporate into exhibitions. This fragment is a study for his most prestigious New Deal mural, The Meaning of Social Security (1940-42), in the former Social Security Building in Washington, DC. Shahn portrayed the unemployed, disabled and elderly people that the Social Security Act would assist, while also subversively including those it would not—farmers and possibly a domestic worker.

This rare retrospective of Shahn’s work comes at a ripe time and, given the many examples of his nonconformity, asks whether we are capable of it ourselves. “Might not one surmise that there is some degree of nonconformity in us all,” Shahn asked in a lecture in 1956, “perhaps conquered or suppressed in the interest of our wellbeing, but which may be touched or rekindled or inspired by just the quality of unorthodoxy which is so deeply embedded in art?”

• Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, Jewish Museum, New York, 23 May-12 October