Ben Shahn's Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Note on Its Reception

Ben Shahn was the most important American artist of recent times to represent a socially oriented art. His reputation and his own catharsis as a social artist came about through his challenging treatment of the Sacco and Vanzetti case and its dramatic reception. Shahn had in effect done the impossible for that period, treated a significant social theme in recognizable form in an acceptably modern style.

Shahn's Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti—23 gouaches-was first exhibited at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery on 13th Street in Manhattan in April, 1932.

The series was based on photographs published by the various Sacco and Vanzetti defense committees. Although his use of photos was known at the time, the full extent of Shahn's reliance on them was not understood. The selection of subjects appeared to be a haphazard choice based on the available visual documentation, such as Vanzetti's hometown, Sacco's family in Italy, Judge Thayer, defense attorneys, witnesses, demonstrations, and Sacco and Vanzetti in prison and in court. The news photos of the period have a deadpan effect, the result of reportage without comment or emphasis.

The manner in which the Sacco and Vanzetti series was painted was not only unusual for the period but also totally different from Shahn's earlier work. His previous style had been derived essentially from Cézanne, Rouault, and the School of Paris of the 1920's; and in those circles, photographs were rarely employed as the underlying model of a painting.

Shahn used documentary news photos for the first time in ten watercolors he painted in 1931, just before his Sacco and Vanzetti series. These watercolors, painted in a chic, rather superficial style, depicted various personalities involved in the Dreyfus case. The Dreyfus series was completed rapidly for a private exhibition presented in a neighbor's barn in Truro, Massachusetts. Although meant as a joke at the