Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

The Downtown Gallery, New York

Mr. Joseph Gersten, until 1973

Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York

George Strichman, New York, until 2002

Madron Gallery, Chicago

Exhibited:

Ben Shahn: Exhibition of New Paintings and Drawings, The Downtown Gallery, New York, October 25-November 12, 1949. Cat no.7.

Ben Shahn - Willem de Kooning - Jackson Pollack, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, October 1951. Cat no.12.

The Comic Spirit, Abraham Shapiro Athletic Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, June 1952. Cat. no. 102.

Masters of Egg Tempera, ACA Galleries, New York, New York, October 19-December 2, 2006

Recorded:

New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1949.

Despite his formalist experimentation, Shahn remained true throughout his long career to the principles of a socially engaged art. A central tenet of his approach was the ability of a work to communicate with its audience, especially those outside the art world, which necessitated a realistic depiction. While this philosophy of artistic production predominated during the New Deal era, it lost favor in the 1950s with the simultaneous ascendancy of socialist suppression and Abstract Expressionism, a movement that carried heavily individualistic and elitist implications. Confronted on one side by harassment from the government and on the other by accusations of conservatism from people within the art establishment, like the critic Clement Greenberg, Shahn stood his ground and publicly promoted a resurgence of humanism amongst artists.

Displaying an acute sensitivity to human suffering and social injustice from an early age, Shahn’s firsthand experiences cemented these concerns. Born in 1898 in present-day Lithuania, Shahn’s birthplace was part of a region known as the Pale of Settlement, a territory along the western border of the Russian Empire where Jews were forced to reside. In addition to this religious discrimination, Shahn witnessed, at the age of five, his father’s banishment to Siberia for “revolutionary activities.” To avoid imprisonment, the elder Shahn made his way to the United States via South Africa and settled in Brooklyn; the remainder of the family immigrated in 1906.

Coming from a family of artisans, Shahn possessed a natural propensity for drawing and was apprenticed to a lithographer at the age of fourteen. It was there, learning how to draft the letters of the alphabet flawlessly, that he first gained an appreciation for the formal qualities of text as an image, an interest that resurfaced in his paintings in the form of Hebrew script.

Upon graduation, Shahn studied biology at New York University and City College, seeking to gain a better grasp of human anatomy, and then pursued a formal artistic education at the National Academy of Design. In the mid-1920s, he spent several years traveling in Europe and North Africa, broadening his knowledge of art and its history.

Returning to Brooklyn in 1929, Shahn had his first one-man show at The Downtown Gallery the following year. During the early 1930s, he worked alongside Mexican artist Diego Rivera on the infamous Rockefeller Center mural, which was destroyed prior to completion because Rivera included the likeness of Vladimir Lenin in his depiction of the theme of labor and industry. During the worst years of the Great Depression, Shahn found work through the Works Progress Administration and then at the Office of War Information during World War II. In the late 1940s, he began teaching art, taking summer positions in Boston, Brooklyn, and Colorado.

Completed and exhibited at The Downtown Gallery in 1949, Vanity represents a transitional phase in the course of Shahn’s artistic and personal development. The painting depicts an anonymous figure in the middle of a private moment: standing with his back to the viewer, he combs his hair while smiling approvingly at his image in the mirror. Dressed in a pair of black overalls and a shabby, short-sleeved shirt, the figure is a member of the working class. The positioning of his wide frame, which shields the primary action and the man’s facial features from the viewer’s direct gaze, heightens the scene’s sense of privacy. Meanwhile, the background, a patterned conflation of sunshine and foliage, is a visual tour-de-force of luscious rosebuds and lilies on a vibrant yellow bed.

A departure from his characteristically dark palette, a change described by the artist as the most important element of the work made during those years, the buoyant colors and the man’s mirthful facial expression endow the painting with a distinctive tone of optimism and gaiety. The work’s cheery quality, however, becomes deliberately equivocal when combined with the moralizing overtones of the chosen title. Shahn often created tension within his works by intentionally presenting conflicting elements. Although dignified and proud, the man appears slightly comical, especially in the context of such a frolicsome background. This gentle mocking on the part of the artist serves to sustain the work’s multivalence.

In terms of artistic development, Vanity reflects Shahn’s turn from the direct portrayal of specific individuals and current events toward the use of symbolism and allegory to allude to universal dilemmas of contemporary life. Motivated by a cross-country trip during which he met a variety of people from all walks of life, Shahn recalled:

I had once believed that the incidental, the individual, and the topical were enough; that in such instances of life all of life could be implied. But then I came to feel that that was not enough. I wanted to reach farther, to tap some sort of universal experience, to create symbols that would have such universal quality.¹

In western iconography, the abstract notion of Vanity is characteristically embodied as an unclothed woman who gazes into a mirror while brushing her hair. Traditionally employed as a warning on the transience of youth and the brevity of life, vanity is also presented as a sin of self-idolatry, where the grace of God is forsaken for a love of oneself. Using elements of this symbolic convention, Shahn subverted preconceptions by making the narcissist a working-class man rather than a beautiful, female nude. This deviation served to alter the message communicated by the painting, functioning in this instance as a reminder of one’s social responsibilities.

In both style and strategy, Vanity is closely related to the work Summertime that resides in the permanent collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA. Exhibited in the same show at The Downtown Gallery, the paintings both focus on emotionally laden moments in the course of an individual’s everyday life. Displaying a similar background of lush flowers against a field of bright yellow, the composition depicts a grumpy-looking man eating a slice of watermelon. The two paintings are amongst the first of a number of works with one-word titles, such as Anger and Desolation, which elaborate upon the nature of specific emotions or experiences. Seen together, Vanity and Summertime represent an attempt on the part of Shahn to maintain optimism in the face of injustice.

Ultimately, Vanity expresses an appreciation for the beauty of life’s simple pleasures while at the same time functioning as a subtle reminder of their transitory, risky nature. Militant in his humanism, the artist was disgusted by self-centered behavior; accordingly, the painting can be interpreted as a lesson on the social dangers of vanity and insouciance. Greatly concerned with the consequences of a man’s way of life, Shahn used the painting to caution that pride, while not necessarily immoral, could become excessive and lead to a selfish, degenerate lifestyle. Nevertheless, his elaboration on the theme of vanity is not a superficial understanding of life and its trials. Complex in its straightforwardness and sympathetic in its criticism, Vanity is a witty, visually enticing expression of the artist’s inner convictions.