The Shape of Content (1)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn, Allegory, 1948, tempera on panel, 36 1/8 × 48 1/8 inches, © 2020 Estate of Ben Shahn / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of William P. Bomar, Jr. In Memory of Mrs. Jewel Nail Bomar and Mr. Andrew Chilton Phillips (source)

“I have come to Harvard with some very serious doubts as to whether I ought to be here at all,” begins Ben Shahn in The Shape of Content. “I am a painter; I am not a lecturer about art nor a scholar of art. It is my chosen role to paint pictures, not to talk about them.” It was a markedly frank admission to begin his 1956 Charles Eliot Norton Lecture. Three years earlier, Herbert Read occupied the same podium, to deliver “Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness.” Nine years prior, Erwin Panofsky spoke (brilliantly, no doubt) of “Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character.”

Shahn continued anyway, noting that even in 1956, Harvard grads were already embarrassing. Page 4:

…I think there is the rather flat fact of which we are all most uncomfortably aware, that our average university graduate emerges from his years of study as something less than an educated man or woman. He is likely to be most strikingly wanting in the accomplishment of perceptivity, in the noncurricular attributes of sensitiveness and of consideration toward all those finer arts which are generally conceded to have played a great part in the humanizing of man. And our graduate is not unlikely to display total blindness with regard to painting itself.

Shahn, whatever you think of his work, was the Real Deal. Imagine being invited to speak at Harvard about art, and telling them, in essence, I probably shouldn’t be here, and maybe you shouldn’t either. This was back when Harvard meant something, before it devolved into a cesspit of plagiarists, Jew-haters, Qatari apparatchiks, and nonentities fit for nothing except bureaucracy.

After that digression, Shahn lets the matter slide and bears down on his point (p. 8):

While I concede that almost every situation has its potential artist, that someone will find matter for imagery almost anywhere, I am generally mistrustful of contrived situations, that is, situations peculiarly set up to favor the blossoming of art. I feel that they may vitiate the sense of independence which is present to some degree in all art. One wonders how the Fauves would have fared without the Bourgeoisie, how Cézanne would have progressed if he had been cordially embraced by the Academy. I am plagued by an exasperating notion: What if Goya, for instance, had been granted a Guggenheim, and then, completing that, had stepped into a respectable and cozy teaching job in some small—but advanced! — New England college, and had thus been spared the agonies of the Spanish Insurrection? The unavoidable conclusion is that we would never have had “Los Caprichos” or “Los Desastres de la Guerra.” The world would not have been called upon to mourn for the tortured woman of the drawing inscribed “Because She Was a Liberal!” Nor would it have been stirred by Goya’s pained cry, “Everywhere It Is The Same!” Neither would it have been shocked by his cruel depictions of human bestiality, nor warned—so graphically, so unforgettably—that fanaticism is man’s most abominable trait.

Whether art and university learning were compatible pursuits was undecided seventy years ago. Shahn graciously admitted that they might be, but wondered (on page 6) “whether the university will become [the artist’s] natural habitat, or will spell his doom.” To Shahn’s mind, three forces were working against art in the university.

The first was dilettantism. Page 13:

Dilettantism, as we all know, is the nonserious dabbling within a presumably serious field by persons who are ill-equipped—and actually do not even want—to meet even the minimum standards of that field, or study, or practice. Dilettantism in the university is best observed in the so-called “smattering” courses themselves, but it is by no means confined to such academic routine; it is a fairly pervasive attitude.

Courses intended for dabblers could neither convey the full seriousness of the artistic pursuit for the hobbyists and would-be appreciators, nor provide the necessary rigor to them with the artistic vocation. (As he explained on page 17, professional art schools have the converse problem, in that art “greatly needs the content of liberal education.”)

The second was fear of creativity (p. 17 again).

The university stresses rather the critical aspects of knowledge—the surveying, the categorizing, the analyzing, and the memorizing. The reconversion of such knowledge into living art, into original work, seems to have diminished. In a few universities—particularly in the East—discouragement of original work has achieved the status of policy. I was told by a department head in one university that in that institution the creative arts are discouraged because “‘it is felt that they may interfere with the liberal arts.” I have never been able to understand actually what he meant, but the result of the policy is brilliantly clear…

Shahn witnessed ceramics students who wouldn’t dare decorate a pot without consulting an art history book. He had a friend from high school who wrote poetry, and college crushed his inclination to write by the time he was a junior. Page 19:

Perhaps my young friend would never under any circumstances have become a good poet…. But I wonder whether it was made clear to him that all poetic forms have derived from practice; that in the very act of writing poetry he was, however crudely, beginning to create form. I wonder whether it was pointed out to him that form is an instrument, not a tyrant, that whatever measures, rhythms, rhymes, or groupings of sounds best suited his own expressive purpose could be turned to form—possibly just his own personal form, but form; and that it too might in time take its place in the awesome hierarchy of poetic devices.

Third, the critical view at the time held the artist as an unlettered genius channeling instructions from the ether. Page 21:

I have one critical fencing companion who assures me that the meaning of one order of art—the nonobjective—is a supra-human, that is, a cosmic one. The artist, as he describes him, is a medium through which all sorts of ineffable forces flow. Any willing, however, on the part of the artist, any intending, would be an interference, would only destroy the time-space continuum, would render impure the art produced.

Shahn was making fun of his friend. A version of this view is true, but you can’t make too much of it. Talents are God-given and every serious artist has had the experience of creating something that did not seem to come from himself. But the conception of the artist as a shaman freights the artist with an undue load of self-importance. Genius, said Shahn (on page 22), needs to be deglamorized. “The genius so-called is only that one who discerns the pattern of things within the confusion of details a little sooner than the average man.” Later:

It seems to me that, far from setting the “genius” apart, the university should constitute itself the natural place toward which the young person of such exceptional talent may turn for an education suitable to his talent. Otherwise we announce, in effect, that the broadness of view, the intellectual disciplines, the knowledge content which the university affords are reserved for the unproductive man—the uncreative, the nonbrilliant. Such an assumption would be an absurdity, and yet how often do I hear voiced the sentiment that the university is not for the young person of genius.

Given what the universities have turned into, we should revisit those voices. I had a private student whom I expressly discouraged from attending university precisely because she was smart and ambitious. She got into an Ivy League school and her family had money, so no harm was done. But she had to switch to a STEM major because the school’s art program was a Potemkin village. Something has gone fatally wrong at the universities, including and maybe especially the Ivies. The explosion of antisemitism on campuses around the country, with academic enclaves declaring themselves Judenrein even before the October 7 massacres, indicates a cultural breakdown that Shahn would have recognized from his childhood in Lithuania under the Russian yoke. But the breakdown extends far beyond ethnic tolerance. It includes the institutional ability to create meaning.

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The second chapter, “The Biography of a Painting,” is an extended response to a review by Henry McBride in The New York Sun that sounds like an unmitigated hatchet job. (Pages 25-26: McBride “launched into a strange and angry analysis of the work, attributing to it political motives, suggesting some symbolism of Red Moscow, drawing parallels which I cannot recall accurately, but only their tone of violence, completing his essay by recommending that I, along with the Red Dean of Canterbury, be deported.”) Firstly, I was struck by the recollection that the Sun used to be a major print newspaper. By the time I was writing for it, it was a website. If I seem pessimistic, kindly consider that when it comes to the arts, I have only ever seen things break down, opportunities diminish, and survival possible only at thinner and more distant margins. That I’m writing this is a reader-supported miracle.

This chapter was not as quotable as the first, but it describes the making of a modernist figurative picture (Allegory, posted above) with greater astuteness than anything I’ve ever seen. Shahn appreciated nonobjective painting but loved images too much to take it up. (I relate.) He felt caught between what came to be called hermeneutics and what came to be called formalism. Page 26: “I have had in mind both critical views, the one which presumes a symbolism beyond or aside from the intention of a painting, and the other, that which voids the work of art of any meaning, any emotion, or any intention.”

Shahn wanted to paint pictures that touched on life without being painted from life. Regarding Allegory (page 32): “The image that I sought to create was not one of a disaster, that somehow doesn’t interest me. I wanted instead to create the emotional tone that surrounds disaster; you might call it the inner disaster.” Reading and rendering the history of the Dreyfus Affair opened his work. Page 36:

At just that time I was absorbed in a small book which I had picked up in France, a history of the Dreyfus case. I would do some exposition of the affair in pictures. So I set to work and presented the leading malefactors of the case, the defenders, and of course Dreyfus himself…. What had been undertaken lightly became very significant in my eyes. Within the Dreyfus pictures I could see a new avenue of expression opening up before me, a means by which I could unfold a great deal of my most personal thinking and feeling without loss of simplicity.

Moreover (page 37):

…I further felt, and perhaps hoped a little, that such simplicity would prove irritating to that artistic elite who had already—even at the end of the twenties— begun to hold forth “disengagement” as the first law of creation. As artists of a decade or so earlier had delighted to épater le bourgeois, so I found it pleasant, to borrow a line from Leonard Baskin, to épater l’avant-garde.

That is, shock the avant-garde rather than shock the middle class, which was the motto of Baudelaire before it shriveled into a cliche. I too found a way into a simplified modernist figurative style moved in large part by a reaction against self-appointed arbiters of proper advanced art, after the disgrace of the Guston Affair. Again, consider Goya with a Guggenheim—I’m no Goya, but how would I have found my way if pathetic bureaucrats like the ones responsible for the Guston cancellation had taken a shine to my work?

Shahn distinguished between the universal, which interested him, and the general, which did not. His attempt is kind of a mess but I doubt that it could be done better than what appears on page 47:

But let us say that the universal is that unique thing which affirms the unique qualities of all things. The universal experience is that private experience which illuminates the private and personal world in which each of us lives the major part of his life. Thus, in art, the symbol which has vast universality may be some figure drawn from the most remote and inward recesses of consciousness; for it is here that we are unique and sovereign and most wholly aware. I think of Masaccio’s “Expulsion from the Garden,” so intensely personal that it leaves no person untouched. I think of a di Chirico figure, lonely in a lonely street haunted by shadows; its loneliness speaks to all human loneliness. As an experience, neither painting has anything of the average; both come from extreme limits of feeling and both paintings have a great universality.

He clarifies that he was seeking the “emotional image” (page 48):

…the emotional image is rather made up of the inner vestiges of many events. It is of that company of phantoms which we all own and which have no other sense than the fear sense, or that of the ludicrous, or of the terribly beautiful; images that have the nostalgia of childhood with possibly none of the facts of our childhood; images which may be drawn only from the recollection of paint upon a surface, and yet that have given one great exaltation—such are the images to be sensed and formulated.

Finding that image requires the accumulation of experiences and reflections, and for the artist to persist at “thinking what he wants to think” (page 51). Later he cites Rilke, in a passage of the kind that makes us forgive Rilke for blithering at times: “For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Not until they have turned to blood within us. What an utter jewel. It is usually a bad idea to reply to your critics, but I’m glad that Shahn did in this case.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

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