Ben Shahn worked fervently against injustice, prejudice, and oppression for the entirety of his artistic career. As a Jewish immigrant himself, his work focused on illuminating and uplifting American immigrants, workers, and disenfranchised communities. His most well known works, the series of twenty three paintings titled The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-33) portrayed two working class Italian-American anarchists, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, who were charged with murder and sentenced to death. After public outrage and protests, the artist chose to represent the events as a failure of the American justice system. Throughout his career Shahn created powerful images—paintings, photography, and prints—that directly addressed human suffering, from war-torn landscapes to intimate views of loneliness and poverty. He believed wholeheartedly that art could create an educated and sensitive public. Shahn declared, “I paint two things: what I love and what I abhor.”

This illustration is one image in the book November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three written by Wendell Berry and published in 1963. The date marks the day of the funeral of the American President John Kennedy. The artist felt that the date and event formed a radical point of departure in American history. The book is one of the first artistic reactions to that historical event. The book is composed of a series of poetic vignettes, created by Wendell Berry during four days of continuous television coverage following the tragic events in which Berry felt the need to write about the nation in its time of grief. Shahn illustrates each of Berry’s poems and provides a preface to the text, memorializing the former President. The author and artist form a fine collaboration of sensibilities as each is dedicated to a humanist approach to contemporary life. This original drawing depicts a single man, standing in a field of golden wheat, touching a growing stalk. The background is a golden wash that gives way to a few windows of light blue. The man is pensive, pondering the growth of a new season. Berry’s poem speaks to the upcoming summer and the new world that must move forward.  

Born in Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States in 1906. He began his art training as a lithographer. Between 1919 and 1922 he studied biology at New York University, and went on to study art at the City College of New York and the National Academy of Design. Sharing a studio in 1929 with the photographer Walker Evans stimulated Shahn’s own interest in photography and he worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1938. He experimented with silkscreening and created magazine illustrations and advertisements. Shahn was a teacher and lecturer at many institutions such as University of Colorado, University of Wisconsin, Black Mountain College, and Harvard University. He had many solo exhibitions during his career and was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers.