Word: shahn
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...illuminates almost every scene with the pitiless white glare of stage lighting-never sunlight or moonlight-and his actors move and speak with exaggerated force. These devices, skillfully employed, make Koerner's paintings more arresting than those of such established U.S. realists as Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn. But they are not enough to explain his disturbing power. Koerner's storytelling art is one of implication, and its very theatricalism serves to imply that the "real" world which man has made is equally a fabric of illusions...
Among the few rural paintings in Shahn's show was one of a solitary workman playing Pretty Girl Milking the Cow on a harmonica. It was far from pastoral. Whenever he can, he visits Manhattan "to see my reflection in the windows and rub elbows with the crowd. I take in all the newsreels too, and I think they influence my work quite a bit. Movies are really the master medium...
After 17 years of commercial lithography and another 17 years of intermittent struggle, Shahn has become the country's most successful practitioner of protest painting. His art is so close to propaganda that some of his pictures have been converted into posters (for the OWI, the War Department and the C.I.O.) simply by the addition of lettering. Like most propaganda art, Shahn's suffers from sameness of theme, but sometimes it offers a concise pictorial report as well as a message. Shahn learned to draw the hard way; when he was growing up in Brooklyn, the local toughs...
...Shahn's realism is apt to falter when he tries to reproduce a tree in the wind or the curve of a hill. "That part doesn't interest me so much," he says. "God can do what He likes, but man is more surprising...
...best-known oil, exhibited at the Academy in 1936, and the Academy's award-winner of the year, showed that Belcher's realism was of a far more literal sort than Ben Shahn's. Belcher once described the painting as "a picture of a shabby though very happy gentleman who is obviously a street musician. He is at home, seated at his table. You can see how he has been enjoying himself-there are heads and tails of herrings on a plate, a bottle which has contained stout, and a glass which betrays the fact that...