Art in the pursuit of social justice

Shahn’s most famous work — it’s at once accusation and elegy — is his dual portrait of the executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, from 1931-32. (It’s in the show.) The signature image is a 1963 painting of the US Supreme Court in session in 1953.

That date signifies because Shahn did the painting in observance of the 10th anniversary of the court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which found segregation unconstitutional in public education. With the looming importance of a very differently composed Supreme Court in 2025, the painting declares the show situating itself in where we are now.

Shahn (1898-1969) would have approved. Situating his work in the political issues of his era did much to define his artistic enterprise. More than that, it defined who he was. “I guess I am filled with righteous indignation most of the time,” he once said. The sentiment expressed displays an uncharacteristic understatement.

Born in what is now Lithuania, Shahn came to America in 1906. His being an immigrant further underscores his relevance to the present moment. He painted, made prints, became a photographer and was hired by the federal government’s Resettlement Administration (which would become the Farm Security Administration), designed posters, did magazine illustrations. There are Shahn covers in the show for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Fortune. That the foremost capitalist periodical of the postwar years featured the work of an artist so proudly of the left says something about both Fortune’s confidence and Shahn’s prominence.

Primarily figurative, Shahn’s work easily lent itself to illustration and graphic design. The more obvious pertinence of “Nonconformity” in the show’s title, is to politics. It also applies to art. Clement Greenberg, that pharaoh of mid-century formalism, dismissed Shahn’s work as “beside the point as far as present-day painting is concerned.” At a time when abstraction could seem as mandatory in the art world as anti-communism was in Washington, Shahn went his own, more traditional way.

Even so, he could be quite pictorially advanced. There’s the way the blankness of the front wall dominates his striking 1939 gouache, “Handball,” with realism doing double duty as formal daring. The almost-shocking blackness of the widows’ dresses in “Italian Landscape,” a tempera on paper from 1943-44, combines a Modernist stylization with documentary accuracy. Even that Supreme Court painting, also a tempera on paper, has a sky-like blue background and set of columns all but overwhelming the presence of the justices, lined up along the lower edge of the painting. The work is part quasi-abstraction, part political statement. That Shahn was chosen in 1954 with as vanguard an artist as Willem de Kooning, to represent the United States as joint representatives at the Venice Biennale speaks to his capacity for experiment as well as his stature in the art world.

Just as Shahn’s political engagement can now make him seem so contemporary, so does his figuration. In the years after his death, representational art returned to respectability — often employed because it lent itself so well to political statement. Think of the work of Leon Golub or the “Klan” paintings of Philip Guston. A 1954 Shahn drawing, “Artist and Politicians” could be a forerunner of Guston’s paintings of “heads,” as he called them, which succeeded the Klan paintings, which he referred to as his “hoods.”

The greatest political art, and, it’s disappointingly rare, maintains a perilous balance between the specific and universal. The two supreme examples would be Goya’s “Disasters of War” print series and Picasso’s painting “Guernica.” Too attached to specificity, political art becomes a version of illustration: noble and righteous, but a lesser artistic thing precisely because of that nobility and righteousness. Too universal, it becomes visual sermon — or pep talk. Reporters covering Nelson Rockefeller used to mock the New York governor’s penchant for citing “BOMFOG” in his speeches: “brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.”

The more generic political art gets, the more it risks BOMFOG status: What’s good for humankind is not necessarily good for art. With his renderings of Sacco and Vanzetti. Shahn made enduring political art. Often, though, the later work especially went the BOMFOG route. That he was among the 273 photographers represented in “The Family of Man”, that most BOMFOG of photography exhibitions — and mounted by that least BOMFOG of institutions, the Museum of Modern Art — makes sense. So does the inclusion of Consuelo Kanaga.

Kanaga (1894-1978) shared Shahn’s commitment to social justice. “I thought a medium like photography could change the world,” she once said. That Kanaga put both verbs in the past tense speaks to an idealism no less strongly held for being grounded in experience.

That idealism and the many experiences that it both inspired and was tested by are visible throughout the Brooklyn Museum’s impressively comprehensive retrospective, “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” which includes nearly 200 photographs and related materials. The show runs through Aug. 3.

It’s hard to imagine Shahn in a different milieu from New York City and its environs. Like a real-life Antaeus, he drew strength from contact with that particular patch of asphalt-covered earth. No small part of the power of his photographs of the South and Midwest for the Resettlement Administration, and as a body of work they exceed anything else he did, comes from Shahn’s viewing those places with the freshness of a Lower East Side perspective.

It’s equally hard to associate Kanaga (1894-1978) with one particular place. Born in Oregon, she variously lived and worked in San Francisco, Denver, New York, back to San Francisco, with time in Europe and North Africa, the American South, New Mexico, finally settling in Westchester County, north of New York, for the final several decades of her life.

Kanaga’s mobility was artistic, too. She worked as a photojournalist, gravitated to the aestheticism of Alfred Stieglitz, was affiliated with the Bay Area photographers of Group f/64, and later, in New York, joined the vigorously left-wing Photo League.

Such eclecticism lent Kanaga’s work an impressive variety and sense of openness. It also made it harder for her to establish a reputation. The body of work did not lend itself to placement in a particular category or school. The one continuous element in her photography, as in her life, was that commitment to social justice. One sees this especially in Kanaga’s many photographs of Black sitters. At a time when they received little attention from established photographers, and what attention they did get was more often as types than individuals, Kanaga saw her Black subjects as individuals. That was as true of an anonymous “Young Girl in Profile,” perhaps Kanaga’s best-known photograph, as of someone as famous as the poet Langston Hughes.

Her work wasn’t limited to issues and causes. There’s a marvelous still life of a pitcher and bar of Ivory soap and several striking portraits of writers and artists: Hughes, Stieglitz, the painters Mark Rothko and Milton Avery. But what comes through most clearly in Kanaga’s work is an unfailing sense of engagement — with social issues, yes, but even more with what matters most about any worthwhile social or political issue: human beings.

BEN SHAHN, ON NONCONFORMITY

At Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., New York, through Oct. 12. 212-423-3271, thejewishmuseum.org

CONSUELO KANAGA: Catch the Spirit

At Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, N.Y., through Aug. 3. 718-638-5000, www.brooklynmuseum.org

Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].