Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn painted the Sacco and Vanzetti case into American art, photographed the Depression for Roy Stryker, and spent his career insisting that art could take sides. He was born in Lithuania to a Jewish family, came to Brooklyn at eight, and trained as a lithographer's apprentice - the discipline of commercial lettering stayed in everything he did afterwards. The twenty-three gouaches of The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, made in 1931-32 while the executions were still raw, established him: flat, hard-edged, closer to a poster than to a painting, and openly accusatory. He assisted Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center mural that was destroyed, and painted murals for the Bronx post office and the Social Security building. Between 1935 and 1938 he worked for the Resettlement Administration and the FSA, and his photographs - made with a right-angle viewfinder so subjects would not see him aiming - are among the strongest in that file and fed directly into his paintings. In the 1950s he was investigated for his politics and testified before a Senate subcommittee. He also designed posters for the CIO, illustrated books and record sleeves, and wrote The Shape of Content, a set of Harvard lectures still read by designers. He designed the 1965 postage stamp commemorating the Four Freedoms. His photographs were largely forgotten until rediscovered in the FSA file in the 1960s and are now exhibited in their own right. He refused to name names when questioned about his politics. Sacco and Vanzetti were pardoned in effect by a proclamation of the governor of Massachusetts in 1977, fifty years after the executions.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1969 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist