Mirrors & Messages

One of the nation's most admired artists last week showed what he had accomplished in his last 25 years of painting. The retrospective exhibition at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery proved that in the past quarter century the art of burly Ben Shahn has mellowed and broadened with the man. The bristling dark mustache of his fiery youth has faded to white, and now it screens more smiles than scowls. At 56, after many storms, Shahn seems to have entered a calm sea.

Shahn was raised in a Brooklyn slum, where the local toughs forced him to portray favorite athletes on the pavement with chalk. Little Ben learned to draw very well indeed. He also developed a temper. It was the perfect schooling for a "proletarian-school" painter. Shahn grew up to startle the art world with a series of watercolors, almost as beautiful as they were bitter, based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. He became perhaps the best, and most depressing, painter of the Great Depression. Shahn's "havenots" were lean as greyhounds and sad-eyed as spaniels; his "haves" always looked as if they had had too much.

The details were wonderfully convincing. "There's a difference," Shahn would explain, "between the way a $12 coat wrinkles and the way a $75 coat wrinkles." He used a camera to record hundreds of such differences, then translated them into the sparse, nervous lines that are his trademark. But for years his main business was simply to protest evils and inequities. Shahn made his messages so plain that many of them were converted into posters by the addition of a slogan. During World War II Shahn became a poster artist for the Government, later put the horror and ruin of war into some of the most powerful pictures of his career. The changes of history were clearly not stranding Shahn; he still held a wickedly glinting mirror up to the woes of the world. But that job ceased to satisfy him.

"Five or six years ago," Shahn says, "I got the idea that just reflecting things wasn't enough. I'd always been a great one for sticking to the facts. Now I decided to generalize, to make pictures that would be true in more ways than one." As a result, he stopped using photographs for material, began making big.

semi-abstract temperas with such titles as Beatitudes, Cybernetics and Everyman.

The protest is still there. But it is stated in poetic rather than in "proletarian" terms. Shahn still draws for two hours every morning ("like doing finger exercises"), and the liveliness of his draftsmanship keeps even the vaguest of his new works from seeming too diffuse.

If the Brooklyn toughs of his boyhood would never appreciate the aging Ben Shahn, coming generations well may.

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