Africa (Primary Title)
Ben Shahn, American, 1898 - 1969 (Artist)
Born in Lithuania to a Russian Jewish family and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Ben Shahn trained as a lithographer before turning to painting. His acute sensitivity to injustice linked him to the social realism movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the artist also considered his work more broadly as abstract in style, allegorical in content, and international in scope.
Africa, purchased from VMFA’s 1957 Judge the Jury exhibition, resonates with the artist’s biography. Shahn’s father, a socialist in czarist Russia, was persecuted for his religious and political beliefs. He fled Lithuania and for South Africa, then relocated to the United States with his family. In the 1920s, the artist and his wife also visited North Africa. This sensitive homage to the continent reveals, in form and content, Shahn’s admiration for African maternity figures. It dates from the year of the artist’s prestigious appointment as Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University and two years after his exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, an international honor he shared with abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.
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