Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.
During the war years of 1942–43, Shahn worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), but his pieces lacked the preferred patriotism of the day and only two of his posters were published. His art’s anti-war sentiment found other forms of expression in a series of paintings from 1944 to 1945, such as Death on the Beach, which depicts the desolation and loneliness of war. In 1945 he painted Liberation about the Liberation of Paris which depicts children playing in the rubble. He also did a series, called Lucky Dragon, about the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (literally, Lucky Dragon No. 5), the Japanese fishing boat caught in the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb blast. As of 2012, an important part of this series is in the collections of Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art.
Kuboyama" Saga of the Lucky Dragon He died from H-bomb testing at Bikini Island, 1961
Brushed Ink
39 × 25 in | 99.1 × 63.5 cmThe Lucky Dragon. Kuboyama was an ordinary man who measured well against his fellow men.We Did Not Know What Happened to Us, ca. 1960, tempera on wood, 48 x 72 1⁄8 in. (121.9 x 183.2 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.72Farewell
1961
Tempera on paper, 53 x 72 cm
This painting belongs to the final series of drawings and paintings by Ben Shahn, “The Saga of the Lucky Dragon”, which he produced between 1960 and 1962 in protest against the American nuclear experiments in the Pacific Ocean. In particular, the works criticise an accident in March 1954 that involved the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, engulfed by a radioactive cloud near the Bikini Atoll.
Shahn condenses the narration of this tragic event in a few visual elements that draw the gaze of the observer alternately to the upper part of the painting, where the toxic clouds are concentrated, and the lower part, invaded by a multitude of hands that obsessively reproduce the farewell gesture of the title.STOP H BOMB TESTS. 1960.
46x29 3/4 inches, 116 3/4x75 1/2 cm.
Condition A-: slight darkening in bottom margin and lower left corner; creases in image; hand-numbered 23/128 in pencil. Silkscreen. Paper.
In 1962, Shahn was a founding member of Graphic Artists for SANE (Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy). He created this limited edition silkscreen "for a fundraising effort in a campaign advocating control of nuclear bomb tests" (Prescott p. 140). "The frightening devil mask suggests the evil consequences of hydrogen bomb tests. The red 'STOP,' overprinted on the black mask, acts as a barrier between the viewer and the mask, visually suggesting that the evil can be averted" (ibid). Prescott 171, Clash of Ideologies p. 144.Second Allegory (1953), tempera on canvas mounted on masonite, 53 1/2 x 31 1/3 inches (courtesy Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignThe News (Lucky Dragon).
Pen and ink on cream laid paper, 1957. 175x150 mm; 6 7/8x5 7/8 inches. Signed in ink, lower right recto.
Ex-collection The Downtown Gallery, New York; Ben Shahn Estate, Roosevelt, New Jersey; Krevsky Fine Art, San Francisco.
An illusration of this drawing is reproduced in "The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon" by Ralph E. Lapp, published in 1958. Shahn also worked with Lapp to illustrate a series of three articles published in Harper's Magazine from 1957-58 about the fishing boat, "Lucky Dragon", that was contaminated by the 1954 Bi
Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.
