Ben Shahn.

• Author: Flynn, Patrick JB

Throughout his life, Ben Shahn paid close attention to the human heart; for those who know his art, the heart beats a little steadier. This book proves that Ben Shahn was a master artist. I have always loved his work, especially his books, with their spirited, hand-lettered pages, but I understood little of his motivation. In this big, beautiful book, Frances K. Pohl, who teaches art history at Pomona College and has written often about Shahn, delineates his history, placing his life in tandem with his personal writings and illustrating it with hundreds of color reproductions of Shahn's works. It makes a generous parcel of ideas, for Shahn was a prolific artist, responding fully to the radical politics and social developments taking place in Twentieth Century America.

Born to a Russian Jewish family in Lithuania in 1898, Shahn grew up in the small town of Vilkomir, forty miles east of the city of Kovno. His childhood in Lithuania instilled in him a love for storytelling and set him on the path to fighting injustice. Social, economic, and political persecution of Jews was widespread, and Shahn's father, Joshua Hessel Shahn, was well in the middle of it as a socialist in active resistance to the Czar. The elder Shahn fled Lithuania for South Africa and then moved on to the United States, where he sent for his family.

Ben was eight years old when he entered the chaotic world of Brooklyn, leaving behind him the closed community and intimate Bible legends of Jewish Lithuania. He entered the ever-swirling melting pot of America, where all life was in a state of transition. New problems, jobs, faces, and ideas from a culture full of strife and opportunity, but not without its own version of racism and discrimination against the Jewish immigrant. This proved fertile ground for Shahn's development as an artist, offering a rich tableau of imagery--run-down buildings, garbage-strewn vacant lots, and the crowded streets exposing the complex textures of family life.

Shahn went to work at age fourteen as an apprentice in his uncle's lithography shop. Here he learned the art of letter-making and developed a strong appreciation of the written word, memorizing Shakespeare, reading the Iliad and the writings of Henry Adams and Tolstoy. Through the exacting discipline of drawing letter forms, he developed a strong appreciation of composition, balance, and proportion. This aesthetic understanding was to influence his art-making throughout his life. He attended night school, graduated from high school, and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, where he started painting. He used his earnings from...