September 2023

The MAC is happy to announce that a part of its Ben Shahn collection will be included in Dr. Laura Katzman's Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name held at the Reina Sofía (Madrid). According to its American publisher, Princeton University Press, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity offers a fresh and wide-ranging account of the work of Ben Shahn (1898–1969), a Jewish immigrant from Russian-controlled Lithuania who became one of America’s most prominent and prolific “social viewpoint” artists from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War.

Revealing why Shahn remains so relevant today, the book examines his commitment to progressive political causes, from combating fascism to fighting for civil rights. Incorporating international perspectives, it investigates his World War II poster art, labor-related work, and engagement in postwar artistic debates. It brings new insights to Shahn’s social realist and documentary styles and their evolution into allegorical, lyrical, and often abstract idioms that embrace the philosophical and the spiritual. And it demonstrates the underappreciated complexity of Shahn’s layered visual language and how he experimented with modernist conceptual strategies—often involving photography—to create his paintings, murals, drawings, prints, posters, illustrated books, and commercial designs.

Shahn’s guiding credo—formulated in the Cold War—asserted that nonconformity was the precondition for all significant art and great social change. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity illuminates why the artist’s work should be seen as a series of “nonconformities” driven by his steadfast dedication to social justice and humanistic values.