Word: shahn
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...started to paint this week's cover portrait of Sargent Shriver, chief of the anti-poverty campaign, Artist Ben Shahn recollected his own fairly close acquaintance with the condition of the poor. "I grew up with it," he says, "and then had another dose during the Depression...
Lithuania-born, Brooklyn-bred, the young immigrant was raised in a Williamsburg slum. Later Shahn attended art schools in the U.S. and Europe, and over the years evolved his own distinctive style, winning fame as a painter of biting social comment, somewhere between caricature and fantasy. His work has taken many forms. During World War II, he drew posters for the U.S. Office of War Information. He has also done murals and stage sets. In 1956-57, exercising a kind of poetic license, he lectured on art as Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard. Many of Ben Shahn...
...portrait of Shriver, his seventh TIME cover, is a good example of the qualities for which Shahn is noted: a sureness of line and tone, meticulous attention to detail, but not exactly a passion for photographic likeness. Shahn catches Shriver in a mood at once pensive and bemused, an intent man beset with a maze of problems. "His intention is good," Shahn says of him, "but he can't do it alone...
...born restless," writes Parks, and he tried everything. In 1937, after seeing a collection of dust-bowl pictures by Carl Mydans, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn (who in those days was a photographer as well as a painter), Parks decided to try photography. He hustled to a downtown Seattle hock shop, bought a $12.50 Voigtlander camera, spent half an hour learning how to use the thing, then began shooting everything that crossed his path. So intent was he that he fell into Puget Sound while trying to photograph sea gulls...
Among the guests were Painters Willem deKooning and Ben Shahn, Novelist Katherine Anne Porter, Poetess Marianne Moore, Architects Edward Durell Stone and Walter Gropius, Photographer Edward Steichen, Inventor Buckminster Fuller, Actors Alfred Lunt and Fredric March. Also invited but conspicuously absent was Playwright Arthur Miller, who, like Poet Robert Lowell on a similar occasion last June, sent his regrets, and for good measure sent Lyndon Johnson a nasty little note condemning U.S. policy in Viet...