Word: shahn
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...stubborn," Ben Shahn insists at 69. "I paint two things: what I love and what I abhor...
...first 20 years of his career, Shahn's hates were what his public loved best-his scarifying gouaches of the 1921 Sacco-Vanzetti trial, his browbeaten bread-liners of the Depression, his concentration-camp victims of World War II. Since the mid-1950s, however, his work has mellowed. Nowadays, Shahn's gift is spurred as often by fondness as it is by rancor...
...fact, a major retrospective of 78 paintings and drawings on display last week at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California includes a veritable gallery of Shahn's recent enthusiasms (see color opposite). The sparkling poster for the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, executed at the request of Composer Gian Carlo Menotti, shows a dashing harlequin of the Italian Renaissance theater's commedia dell' arte...
Cast-Off Antlers. The poster for an off-Broadway production of Arthur Miller's View from the Bridge was done after Shahn had seen the play at rehearsal. He found it "very powerful, very moving." Shahn's watercolor, Branches of Water or Desire, reflects his admiration for the poetry of his son-in-law, Alan Dugan, who won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 with his first volume. The picture illustrates one of the poems, which begins...
...poem compares both bird song and discarded antlers to the mysterious urge of the human mind to create. When Dugan saw the eerie anguish with which Shahn had endowed his subject, he went back to reread his poem. Shahn liked the watercolor so much that he redid it as a silk-screen print, making 50 copies. "I love doing public art," he explains. "Whenever a collector buys a painting of mine, he goes off and I never see it again...