Word: shahn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons" are strong examples; they're the only lectures to be given in a foreign language, French, Aaron Copland was the Norton lecturer in 1951-52 with "Music and Imagination." And in 1956-57 the painter Ben Shahn not only gave "exceptional lectures" on "The Shapes of Content" but he set up a studio in the basement of the Fogg museum, where he allowed students to watch him at work. Sometimes he helped them with their own. Four years before Shahn, e.e. cummings came to Harvard to present what have...
...rooms of the Vatican Museum, the refurbished Borgia Apartment near the Sistine Chapel. Much of the show consisted of Italian paintings and massive sculptures by Giacomo Manzu and Emilio Greco. But there were also two rooms full of American paintings, one devoted entirely to works by Ben Shahn...
...more than his style, it is Shahn's choice of subject and statement that cut the same in both painting and photo; a social realist, influenced by the Cubists, he captures different planar levels in "Roadside Inns," "Destitute Ozark Residents," and "Cotton Pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas." The young girls picking cotton carry their long white bags like wedding trains falling in curves down the foreground of the photo. These cotton workers are as much tied to their jobs as the black woman in "Relief Check, Scotts Run, West Virginia" is tied to a life on welfare. Leaning out the window...
...Shahn, the other easel artist of the group, also deals with photography and painting in similar ways. In fact, the photo, "The Blind Accordian Player", taken in 1945, was unmistakably used for a painting that was also called "The Blind Accordian Player". In both Shahn has chosen the same angle, and we see Accordian, expressive hands, and face, with the top of the musician's head cut off--an influence of photographic framing, on painting...
...show is tiny, and instead of really illustrating the Fogg's collection, it points out how little of a collection exists. Of the roughly 3,000 prints, 2,500 of them are by Ben Shahn, gifts of his widow. But luckily the Fogg's photo collection will be growing as a result of a $10,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to purchase photos by contemporary Americans. Hopefully, they will match the sum by July 31, 1972, to fill in some of the collection's gaps: there are no examples of surrealist works--collages, or photograms...