When New York’s Museum of Modern Art first opened its doors, in November 1929, one of the myths it sought to dispel was that for art to be good it had to be European, and it had to carry forward the tradition of formally organized paintings in the mode of the School of Paris. To buck the trend, one of its earliest exhibitions, in the spring of 1930, was “46 Painters and Sculptors Under 35 Years of Age.” Almost all the artists were American, and the best-known painter among them was Ben Shahn. His goal was to use art to protest cruelty and to make injustice visible. Presenting inhumanity in a contemporary style that draws the viewer in, Shahn employed color and line to summon our full attention. It was an unusual ability—to excite us optically while at the same time distressing us emotionally—but Shahn’s heart was awake to the harsh realities of life. The exhibition “Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity,” a career-spanning retrospective, opened in Madrid last year and now comes to the Jewish Museum. —Nicholas Fox Weber