Ben Shahn would have been delighted to see his work in the museum that houses Picasso’s Guernica. Shahn’s goal, after all, was to use art to protest cruelty and to make injustice visible. Presenting inhumanity in a contemporary style that draws us in, Shahn employed color and line to summon the viewer’s full attention. It was an unusual ability—to excite us optically while at the same time distressing us emotionally—but, like Picasso’s, Shahn’s heart was awake to the harsh realities of life. The exhibition “Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity,” at the Reina Sofía Museum, in Madrid, is a jolt that’s both exhilarating and distressing.
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 a show of work called “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, with Isamu Noguchi the most widely recognized sculptor.
