Word: shahn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Warhol began and ended as a commercial illustrator; what lies between is the interesting stuff. He was an adroit draftsman but not a distinguished one. He soon overcame the influences of his early advertising days (Jean Cocteau and Ben Shahn), but the drawing is never more than efficient. Partly for this reason his freehand "studies" of soup cans or dollar bills never acquire the pressure of the silk-screened ones, but it is hard to see how they could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments...
...centuries, the U.S. has been using colorful placards and broadsides to implore the people to do the right thing, from preventing forest fires to keeping mum about military secrets during wartime. Last week 117 examples of this perennial propaganda tool, drawn by the likes of Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn and Norman Rockwell, went on display at the National Archives in Washington in a new exhibition called "Uncle Sam Speaks." The show will run for a year...
...Horrible stuff' was the term once applied by the artist Ben Shahn. "Abominably offensive," said the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. And Philip Glass: "The range of music is truly enormous-opera at the top, Muzak at the bottom." John Cage spoke of composing a piece especially for the tormentors, with no notes in it. "The first step in describing silence is to use silence itself," Cage explained. "Matter of fact, I thought of composing a piece like that. It would be very beautiful, and I would offer it to Muzak." Perhaps Cage had that in mind when he created...
Just how complete the break now is between the papacy and art may be judged from the roomful of uncomfortably "religious" paintings by André Derain, Graham Sutherland and Ben Shahn, enlivened only by a Matisse design for a large stained-glass window that gives the exhibition its feeble coda. Owing in part to the zeal of an association called the Friends of American Art in Religion, run by an art dealer named Lawrence Fleischman under the benign presidency of Terence Cardinal Cooke, masses of otherwise unsalable modern religious art have been decanted into the Vatican since the late...
...modern corporation should project a socially and culturally responsible personality. It should be a tastemaker and thought provoker. It should contribute to civilization." The result was Container's famous 20-year advertising campaign featuring "Great Ideas of Western Man," with illustrations by such notable artists as Ben Shahn, Ernest Trova and James Gill...