Word: shahn
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...most prominent idea that the exhibition conveys to the spectator is that Shahn has severed his connection with those schools of painting which emphasized the technique of the artist's presentation at the expense of subordinating the subject...
...Shahn's method is simplicity itself. In all scenes he uses a wash and fine ink lines. The backgrounds are almost uniformly a depressing blue. Seldom has any modern painter so eloquently depicted his subjects with such an economy of line. Every delineation is expressive, every curve is significant. There is something stark, some terrible frozen fear in every face. Shahn's creations seem to be cowering under some upraised fist...
...mask of the flesh. Dreyfus is not burdened with the martyrdom so often found in literature, and the sketches of the principals in the trial have a delightful vivacity. The impression of Zola is of somewhat alarming proportions, but thoroughly healthy. The spectator is given the idea that either Shahn did the work in this gallery when he was under different influences, or that the subject is so far removed from his own age that he can treat it in a more detached and sprightly vein...
Although almost all of the pictures depicting the Sacco-Vanzetti affair merge on caricature, there is more of art than mere clever distortion in these gouaches. When the exhibit appeared at the Downtown Gallery in New York City, many were inclined to dismiss the whole of Shahn's work as comic-strip treatment of more serious topics, yet even the poignancy that speaks from each picture is testimony that there is something more permanent than grim humor here...
...field of painting Shahn has left something comparable to Upton Sinclair's novel, and Felix Frankfurter's scholarly exposition of what promises to be the major criminal case of the century...