Fig 1: Ben Shahn. Portrait of Walker Evans

For Ben Shahn, the years 1929-31 were a pivotal time of stylistic and thematic changes in which photography played a crucial role. It has been established that the photographer Walker Evans was responsible for introducing Shahn to photography.1 However, the “profound difference”2 embedded in the two artists’ conception of photography has rarely been discussed. Shahn and Evans never compromised their artistic visions regarding the compatibility of art and ideology; Shahn consistently attempted to convey his reformative social visions through his pictorial narratives, whereas, in treating a variety of themes ranging from the documentary to formal abstraction, Evans maintained neutral and detached attitudes toward the subject matter of his photographs. An analysis of Shahn’s two portraits of Evans and The Dreyfus Affair, all done in 1930, and some of Evans’s photographs taken and published in 1928-30 may provide a clue to characterize their different approaches to art.

Shahn, a Russian-Jewish immigrant whose father was a woodcarver and active socialist, became aware of the corruption interwoven into the fabric of society and sympathetic toward the victims of social injustice. In adapting to his new country, Shahn experienced new, yet no doubt familiar, forms of anti-Semitism, “more subtle than those enforced by the Russian Czar, but no less effective in maintaining a social hierarchy.”3 Although he had been making a living as a lithographer since his late teens, Shahn prepared to be a painter.4

During his trips to Europe in the 1920s,5 Shahn, while experimenting with the Post-Impressionst and Fauvist styles of Cézanne, Matisse, Rouault, and Dufy, was also exposed to George Grosz’s critical visual narrative. In 1925, four years prior to his encounter with Evans, Shahn saw in Vienna a copy of Ecce Homo (1922) by Grosz. In retrospect, Shahn revealed that he was deeply moved by the drawing: “I almost dropped dead in excitement over it.”6 He bought a copy. Within the drawings, an acid sarcasm towards bourgeois indulgence in sexual pleasure is conveyed through lively charged, razor-sharp lines. Its revealing content and narrative brevity might have provided Shahn with an excellent model. Shahn, however, was never drawn to the erotic themes that the German artist often depicted to represent bourgeois moral perversity. Through Grosz, who began his career as a graphic artist and whom Shahn admired as “the greatest draftsman of this century,”7 Shahn perhaps confirmed his desire to develop from a draftsman to an artist revealing social reality. After Grosz came to New York, Shahn would visit him in 1933 and 1935 and be given two drawings.8 Shahn enthusiastically groped for an appropriate style to express narrative messages, yet he still had not found his own style by the time he met Evans.

Unlike Shahn, Evans was critical of the cultural pretensions of American bourgeois society. Despite his sheltered middle-class background, he rejected the security of bourgeois life. Even his attempt to become a photographer seemed to be “a willful act of protest against a polite society in which young men did what was expected of them.”9 In his biography, Evans recalled “My poor father, for example... decided that all I wanted to do was to be naughty and get hold of girls through photography, that kind of thing. He had no idea I was serious about it. And respectable, educated people didn’t. That was a world you wouldn’t go into. Of course, that made it more interesting for me, the fact that it was perverse.”10 In 1927 Evans returned to New York after spending one year in Paris and decided to become a photographer. Like “a conventional, if well-groomed, bohemian,”11 Evans toured the city taking pictures while supporting himself through a series of temporary jobs.

Fig 2: Paul Strand, Blind Woman

In the late 1920s, Evans was assimilated to a kind of objective realism. The writing of Flaubert that he had avidly read in Paris and the early photographs of Paul Strand among others inspired him in that direction. Paul Strand’s Blind Woman, 1916,(fig. 2) was a powerful source.12 Evans was drawn to the photographer’s frontal representation of the old blind woman, which minimized the traces of the artist’s emotional response to his subject. Ultimately, realistic content and objective authorship formed two axes of Evans’s photographic world. In an interview Evans stated: “I think I incorporated Flaubert’s method almost unconsciously, but anyway I used it in two ways; both his realism, or naturalism, and his objectivity of treatment. The non-appearance of the author. The non-subjectivity. That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do.”13

Within this frame of logic, Evans had access to realistic themes of documentary photography that had specific references to American life at a specific moment and to modernism’s rational and reductive formal structure. Throughout his career, Evans’s pictures incorporate a range of diverse themes, from the lives of ordinary people to the structural abstraction.
Evans’s New York photographs of 1928 and 1929 demonstrate his double interest in formal abstraction and the documentation of American life. Within balanced compositions and formidable contrasts of black and white, his pictures portray anonymous pedestrians, clerks working in shops, workers resting on the street. One of his first published photographs, printed in Creative Art of December 1930, shows a busy lunch counter scene in the city.

These various themes represent Evans’s tendency toward a neutral observation of the lives of the city’s denizens. Another group of Evans’s photographs of this time demonstrates his photographic exploration of geometric composition. These pictures focus on architectural patterns and the spatial relationships of modern buildings. A photograph taken in 1928 or 1929 published in Architectural Record in 1930 even recalls Charles Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors, Ford River Rouge Plant, 1927 in its diagonally crossing composition seen from below. The Precisionist’s articulation of the precise structures underlying the machine and the architecture may have reinforced Evans’s photographic experiments with reductive abstraction.

Fig 3: Walker Evans. City Lunch Counter.

Shahn and Evans were intellectually attracted to each other when they first met in September 1929. Just after his return from Europe, Shahn saw Evans at the home of a mutual friend, Dr. Iago Geldston. At Shahn’s insistence,14 Evans moved into the ground-floor studio of Shahn’s apartment at 21 Bethune Street in Greenwich Village. The Shahns lived on the two floors directly above Evans’s studio and Shahn painted in his own living room.15 As Judith Shahn, the artist’s daughter, recalled, “Evans was like a member of the family; he was frequently invited upstairs for supper in the kitchen.”16 “For Evans,” observed his biographer Berlinda Rathbone, “no one could have been a better ally at that moment than the energetic and canny Ben Shahn.”17 According to Bernarda Bryson Shahn, who met Shahn in 1933 and two years later became his wife, “Both artists initially enjoyed each other’s witty, free-minded personalities.”18 Central to their free-mindedness was a shared subversive attitude regarding established bourgeois society. While Evans’s concern was geared more toward bourgeois cultural prejudices, Shahn’s was toward art’s positive function as ideological reformation.

Shahn had been interested in photography before he met Evans and began taking pictures in the early 1930s.19 Amongst Strand’s early “straight” photographs that register minute details and the subtle tonal ranges of objects, his photographs of pedestrians especially impressed Shahn. “Learning from Strand, Shahn often turned his attention to the individual in the urban setting,” observed art historian Susan Edwards.20 Both Shahn and Evans welcomed straight photographs to the extent that they later discussed collaborating on a photography book in which they would oppose both the artificiality of Pictorialist subjects such as female nude 21 and the blurry mechanism of the soft-focus Pictorialism. They rejected romantic subject matter and idealizing techniques, but Shahn was further drawn to the humanistic content of Strand’s early photograph and its critical potential to reveal an underside of society.

In 1930, while working on the subject of The Dreyfus Affair,22 Shahn painted two portraits of Evans. The portraits show expressive styles of Shahn’s pre-photographic period. Shahn’s painterly representations of the photographer suggest the complex nature of the two artists’ acquaintanceship; for Shahn, a portrait meant the painter’s critical observation of the sitter, rather than a flattering resemblance.23

On the simplest level, the two portraits show Evans sitting on a chair. One is painted in oil(fig. 1), the other in watercolor . The canvas of the oil portrait is thickly painted with agitated brushstrokes in bright colors. Evans, in a dress shirt, is arrested in an action while sitting on a wooden chair with his legs spread and holding a camera lens, an evident marker of his profession. The broad contouring used in some parts, the freedom of brushstrokes, and the sporadically applied blue, orange, and dark brown recall Georges Rouault’s early watercolors to which the French painter often added pastel for heavy texture. In comparison, Shahn shows clearer spatial order and emphasizes the fluidity of brushstrokes, creating a more overall elegance than Rouault.

Shahn divided the watercolor portrait into three transparent color-patches: blue, covering the area of the battered wicker chair and the upper body of Evans; white, Evans’s trousers; and a light wash in pale yellow of the surrounding area. While making each color-patch into a concrete shape, the calligraphic and elliptical contours and linear details added later not only give the patches vibrating rhythms, but also enliven the freshness of each color without reducing the color to a function of simple representation. Within this overall scheme, the torso of Evans is barely distinguished by the few flowing lines from the chair in which he is slouching. His shoulders are hunched and his hands are digging into his pockets. The transparent colors and calligraphic linear details are associated with Raoul Dufy’s painting; unlike the Fauve, who depicted figures in a more stylized manner, Shahn emphasizes the individuality of the sitter.

Within both portraits, Evans’s likeness is captured through free yet concise details. Evans’s sensitive or “squeamish”24 personality is suggested through his physiognomy, unique pose, and neat costume. Hardly the idealized type of portraiture, the activated brushstroke and bodily exaggeration evoke a sense of intense psychological and intellectual exchanges between the painter and the sitter. Neither portrait contains any obvious iconographic sign that proves Shahn’s critical apprehension of the photographer, but Shahn’s expressive form and color connote the essential difference embedded in their art; at this time Shahn chose to reject formalist-modernism in favor of a more realistic representation conveying concrete narrative contents. Shahn, who acknowledged in 1929 that “the French school is not for me,”25 baptized Evans with the painterly style of the French school, colorfully characterized the detached nature of Evans’s modernist aestheticism, and covertly differentiated the photographer from himself.

Fig 4: Shahn. The Dreyfus Affair

During the summer of 1930, Shahn and Evans had a two-day joint exhibition in the barn of a Portuguese neighbor on Cape Cod, where they spent the summer. Shahn hung The Dreyfus Affair (fig. 4), a series of works created specially for the exhibition and Evans exhibited his photographs of the neighbors, the Deluze family.

The Alfred Dreyfus Affair, the case of the Jewish officer in the French Army falsely accused of treason, shook France in the 1890s. Participating in political protests in Paris over the more recent Sacco and Vanzetti case in America (the trial of two anarchist Italian immigrants convicted of murder on flimsy evidence), Shahn perceived the Dreyfus case to be a similar conspiracy of the social system against ethnic minorities and the working class.
To create The Dreyfus Affair, Shahn first used published photographic images as models.26 From photographs in the relevant books, old magazines and news articles, he painted the major players in the Dreyfus trial. Fine details are added to broad washes of facial area and clothing to characterize the faces and costume decorations. The backgrounds are left empty or covered with a pale wash. Each portrait has the carefully lettered name in different scripts, the hard edges of which are in sharp contrast with the washed areas of a figure. Despite the quick application of washes, each portrait shows proper bodily proportion, clear features, and additive details drawn with exactness. The Dreyfus Affair demonstrates Shahn’s magnificent graphic skill attained through lithographic training. The shaded areas of the faces suggest volume and space, yet most of the portraits are painted flat. The optical flatness is reinforced by the impersonal arrangement of the letters. The shallow space and fine details are possibly transferred from the photograph, in which abrupt changes of light and shade often cause similar flat effects. The overall transparent colors of The Dreyfus Affair, however, do not effectively emphasize the seriousness of the historical trial. This lightness would disappear with the emphatic patterns--the darker tonalities, nervously broken lines, and an undercurrent of distortion--of The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti that he began to paint the following year.

One of the Deluze photographs exemplifies Evans’s photographic treatment of the subject. The interior scene shows a prickly cactus plant set against the framed family photographs, a souvenir American flag, and a vase of dried flowers. Through the straight photographic technique, both photographs keep the same degree of descriptive exactitude for the objects from the foreground to the background. Particularly in the photograph of the cactus plant within an airless space, the equally distinctive contours and the scattered dark areas, in strong contrast to the white wall, push the photographed objects all-over to the picture plane. This reductive formal process of the photographic still life helps objectify its content, the commonplace American domestic space.

Taken slightly later, however, Hudson Street Boarding House Detail (1931-33) shows an interior scene of a bedroom. In this bedroom picture, the decorative quality is retained by the curvilinear patterns of the wrought-iron bed and the black and white contrast of the bedspread and surrounding areas. However, the shabby interior--the rough wall, the drooped curtains, and the sunken mattress—reveals an economically dire situation. Here, the decorativeness of this photograph collides with its unavoidable suggestion of a specific relation to the outside world; this collision of formal abstraction and social implication makes possible multiple ways of appreciation and interpretation of the work. In this way, Evans refused to assign a predefined meaning to his photography.

Evans’s emphasis upon the absence of the author was another unacceptable point to Shahn, who was conscious of the artist’s social contribution through critical interpretation and active involvement. In response to Shahn’s arguments about the ideological function of art, Evans said: “I wouldn’t let him touch or influence me. If he said I took Depression pictures of human havoc, and I would say that was what I was doing, I would walk out and wouldn’t let him discuss this.”27 In a detached manner, Evans frequently documented subjects that contained specific social situations throughout his career, particularly in 1935 and 1936 when he was hired by the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration.

Fig 5: Shahn. Workers on Street

Despite the irreconcilable difference in their artistic visions, Shahn would incorporate the less formalized type of Evans’s early documentary photographs into his art. These photographs often fail to embody objective approach, as Evans himself recalled: “In 1928, ‘29 and ‘30 I was apt to do something I now consider romantic and would reject.”28 The oblique angle of these photographic studies of people creates a perspectival recession that distracts the viewer from direct visual confrontation with the photographic subject. In the late Thirties, Shahn would use a similar diagonal composition in his own photographs of ordinary people used for his “personal realist” work.29 For instance, the subject of workers resting on the street, which Evans photographed in 1928 or 1929 (fig. 5), is echoed in Shahn’s photograph, Sunday, 1937, and the same subject is again transformed into the painting, W.P.A. Sunday, 1939.

By the early 1930s, Shahn must have fully appreciated Evans’s ambivalent attitudes toward the variety of photographic themes. Despite the evident differences in their early careers, Evans’s extensive experimentation with photography offered an immediate and ample environment in which Shahn became aware of the usefulness of photography for the representation of realistic visual drama. Whereas Evans attempted to privilege photography as a fine-art medium capable of embodying diverse formal and thematic tendencies, Shahn integrated photographic images and details into his painting to convey historically specific and ideologically critical narratives. The portraits of Evans painted by Shahn at the moment of their stylistic breakthrough suggest intimate, intense and critical dialogues between the two young artists.

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