Ben Shahn Spring Lithograph Collectible Poster Expressionist VAGA, NY March 1999. New and unused in original plastic sleeve. No visible damage. See all photos. Will ship rolled in packaging.

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This is a lovely and collectible sturdy lithograph poster print of Ben Shahn’s 1947 Tempura on Masonite artwork called Spring. This poster was for The Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York City for an exhibit in 1998.

About the exhibit:

Known for his socially concerned realist art, from the 1940s through the end of his career Shahn began to make his works less specific critiques of social issues, developing a more introspective style. Through his art, he shared his own experiences and the historical events of his time, transforming them into meaningful commentary on social justice, humanitarian causes, and spiritual redemption.

Highlights of Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn include: Shahn's nostalgic reflections of his boyhood, in such works as Portrait of Myself When Young (1943) and New York (1947); key Social Realist works from the New Deal era such as two preliminary paintings for Jersey Homesteads Mural (c. 1936), Scotts Run, West Virginia (1937) and Myself Among the Churchgoers (1939); his responses to the haunting effects of World War II and its aftermath in Italian Landscape (1943-44), Liberation (1945), and Spring (1947); selections from the series The Saga of The Lucky Dragon (1960-62), inspired by the fate of a Japanese fishing crew exposed to American nuclear testing in March 1954 in the Marshall Islands; and Shahn's interest in biblical themes, Jewish traditions and the Hebrew language, expressed in Maimonides (1954) and Ram 's Horn and Menorah (1958). The exhibition ends with Portrait of Dag Hammarskjold (1962), completed around the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

Born in Kovno, Lithuania, 100 years ago, Benjamin Zwi Shahn was the oldest of five children in a traditional Orthodox Jewish family. Shahn emigrated with his mother, brother and sister to Brooklyn in 1906. There, they joined his father, a socialist, who had been exiled to Siberia for his subversive activities. Growing up in America, the young Shahn gradually moved away from the religious traditions of Judaism and established a secular Jewish identity aligned with the causes of labor and social reform during the 1930s.Training as a lithographer's apprentice helped shape Shahn's mature painting style. Following study in Paris in the 1920s, Shahn shared a studio with the photographer Walker Evans and had his first solo exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in 1930. During the ensuing decade, he created works of art in response to the social, economic and political conditions of the Depression - in a style known as Social Realism. He became known as a socially and politically engaged artist and in 1932 gained fame with his series on the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian immigrant anarchists.

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