Ben Shahn was one of my earliest inspirations as an artist. He believed art was “one of the last remaining outposts of free speech”, and his dedication to social realism led him to paint and draw the American experience of the 1930’s as he lived it. He captured the poor and the working class with his pen and brush, and his passion for justice caused him to create a series of 23 paintings on the subject of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Those works brought him to the attention of the great Mexican Muralist, Diego Rivera, who hired Shahn to assist in painting Man at the Crossroads (the mural at Rockefeller Center in New York that would be destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller for political reasons).

Shahn’s war time anti-Nazi posters created for the US government were brilliant graphic works that set the standard for political poster art. Shahn continued to produce exceptional works through the 1960’s that denounced the Vietnam war and militarism. In 1964, after three young civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi by the KKK, Shahn made silkscreen prints praising the slain heroes Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (pictured above).

In 1949, before non-representational abstract art gained its place of dominance, New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a conference where Ben Shahn and abstract artist Robert Motherwell argued their positions. In explaining why he considered realism the best way for an artist to reach an audience, Shahn said the following:

“I think any artist, abstract or humanistic, will agree that art is the creation of human values. It may have cosmic extension. It may reflect cosmic abstraction. But however earnestly it reaches out into the never-never land of time-space, it will still always be an evaluation through the eyes of man. It may deny but can never cast off its human origin. Trying to get away from content seems to me a little wistful—somewhat like Icarus trying to shed the earth. And at our particular point in history, it’s more than wistful; it appears almost to consort with those forces which would repudiate man and his culture as ultimate values.

We are living in a time when civilization has become highly expert in the art of destroying human beings and increasingly weak in its power to give meaning to their lives. I don’t know anyone on either side of the water or on either side of the political fence who has the slightest degree of optimism about the direction in which civilization is moving. It is peculiarly within the province of the artist to minister to man in the somewhat starved area of the spirit. It is for the artist to discover new truths about man and to reaffirm that his life is significant. In this sense, I don’t mind being called a ‘realist,’ because I believe that these are the realities, the content, which gives to art its stature.”

In 1848 the young French painter Gustave Courbet and a circle of dissident artists and intellectuals regularly met at a Parisian café called the Brasserie Andler. It was there after many lively discussions that the term “Realism” was first used to describe the style of art and literature the mavericks were striving for. The art establishment richly rewarded those who painted highly romanticized scenes of the well-heeled at work and play. But Courbet believed art must show life as it is, and advocated artists getting involved in the social issues of the day. The fact that he painted ordinary working people and peasants in naturalistic settings outraged the well-to-do. It should go without saying that Courbet had a troubled relationship with the art authorities of the day. In 1850 he wrote:

“In our so very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies, I must address myself to them directly.”

In 1855, after his work was rejected by the Universal Exhibition, Courbet set up a tent outside the exhibit hall and held a one-man show he called Le Réalisme. The accompanying exhibition catalog he titled “Realist Manifesto”, a brochure that helped initiate the coming revolution in painting - Impressionism. Every working artist should embrace Courbet’s exemplary spirit of defiance, because while art has changed certain dynamics have not. We have a new entrenched art establishment that is every bit as elitist and distant from the people as the officials Courbet faced in his day. It is time to pitch our own tents in front of the edifices of the postmodern to announce the return of the painters.

To learn more about Gustave Courbet, I highly recommend T. J. Clark’s, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution.