Artist/Maker
Ben Shahn
(American, 1898 – 1969)
Picnic, Prospect Park
1930
Oil on canvas
Unframed: 24 1/4 × 31 7/8 in. (61.6 × 81 cm)
Framed: 32 1/2 × 40 1/2 in. (82.6 × 102.9 cm)
Framed: 32 1/2 × 40 1/2 in. (82.6 × 102.9 cm)
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City
IL2021.51.75
Following the persecution of his father for anti-tsarist activities, Ben Shahn emigrated with his family from Lithuania to New York in 1906. They settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Shahn attended the local public school; apprenticed at Hessenberg’s Lithography Shop on Beekman Street in Manhattan; enrolled in art classes at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side; and studied at New York University, City College, and the NAD. After a brief period of experimentation with European modernism, Shahn turned to Social Realism. With works like The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti depicting the controversial arrest, trial, and execution of two Italian-American anarchists, and social documentary photographs of a ravaged heartland and its inhabitants for the Farm Security Administration, he established himself as a trenchant political critic and one of the most prolific and best-known artists of the Depression era.
This painting portrays four adults lounging with a baby on a hilltop in a wooded area. Rolling terrain dotted with chimneyed houses stretches beyond, and the entire scene brims with summer greenery. The visible facture, expressive brushwork, distorted bodies, and spatial compression mark this painting as an early work inspired by the landscapes of such French modernists as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, which Shahn encountered during his travels through Europe during the 1920s. As he recounted, “During the early French-influenced part of my artistic career, I painted landscapes in a Post-Impressionist vein, pleasantly peopled with bathers, or I painted nudes or studies of my friends.”
Following his return to the United States in 1929, Shahn applied this style to domestic subjects in such paintings as Bathers at Truro, depicting a scene at the beach near his summer home in Truro on Cape Cod. Likewise, this painting describes a local spot identified as Prospect Park, the urban greenspace near Shahn’s childhood home in Williamsburg and not far from the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood in which he lived upon returning from Europe until 1932. In a 1952 letter, Shahn reflected that the Brooklyn landscape “was probably one of the last . . . oils I painted—I got interested in tempera-fresco and other media at about that time and have not painted an oil since.”
Though clearly indebted to European modernism, the late oil painting also seems to herald Shahn’s nascent sociopolitical engagement. At the time, the artist was beginning to question his early style as derivative: “I didn’t know either where I stood when I came back to America in 1929. I had seen all the right pictures and read all the right books. . . . But still it didn’t add up to anything.” He resolved: “If I am to be a painter I must show the world how it looks through my eyes, not theirs.” Notably, the figures in Prospect Park appear to be working class. The reclining man is in shirtsleeves, and the one next to him wears blue coveralls suggestive of a factory uniform. Expressive distortions emphasize the figures’ powerful, laboring hands and muscular bodies, and the abstracted space creates a sense of pressure and discomfort even in the outdoor expanse. The strong, bulky bodies at rest—combined with the somber, almost melancholic expressions—suggest less leisure than forced inactivity during the Great Depression. Even in this scene of ostensible pleasure, then, emerge signs of Shahn’s Social Realism and the commitment to the struggles of ordinary people that would define his work for decades to come.
ClassificationsPAINTINGS
Collections
- Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
Bernard Buffet
1989
IL2021.51.101
