Airbrushed from Art History: Ben Shahn and American Expressionism

In Common Man Mythic Vision Stephen Polcari compares and contrasts the work of Ben Shahn with his postwar American art peers:

'During and after World War II, whether one was a Social realist like Ben Shahn and the WPA artists, a Regionalist like Thomas Hart Benson, an Expressionist like Rico Lebrun, Hyman Bloom, or Abraham Rattner, or an Abstract Expressionist like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, most American artists engaged the principal crisis of their time: the survival of the nation and of humane civilisation.'

'Shahn ... reshaped his style with new subject matter, a more universal outlook, and a new artistic language of symbolic emotion ... his adoption of a new mythic and allegorical language was only one of the ways he contributed to a new American approach to art; particular expressive themes were another ... With works such as Sound in the Mulberry Tree, 1948, with its Hebrew lettering and biblical verse, Maimonides, 1954, which evoked the medieval Jewish sage, Third Allegory, 1955, with its shofar and prayer shawl, and The Parable, 1958, with its drowning or emerging patriarch, Shahn sought to express universal truths. Yet, these works undoubtedly reflect Shahn's new appreciation for the heritage that he had restrained in his early work. The Holocaust brought forth a renewed identification with, and need for reaffirmation of, Shahn's Jewishness ...

fellow radical painter Philip Evergood was also moved to depict the effects of the war in mythic and symbolic language. Evergood's The New Lazarus, 1927 - 54, conflates his typical Social Realist edginess with a mythic biblical image of the evils of war and death, and the hope that these horrors will be redeemed by resurrection ...

Benton Murdoch ... Spruance's Souvenir of Lidice ... depicts three men nailed to crosses - in other words, a modern Calvary. This contemporary crucifixion was inspired by the Nazi slaughter slaughter of the citizens of Lidice, Czechoslovakia ... Spruance followed his war work with a further use of this symbolic language. it is reflected in works of 1943 such as Riders of the Apocalypse with its air war; Pietà - From the Sea showing Christ as a dead seaman; and Epiphany, in which the stars of social reconstruction imagery ... appear in a new context ...

With America's entry into the war, Benton altered his approach, now using biblical imagery to address America's political needs. In 1942, he produced a suite of paintings called the Year of Peril ... the series narrated the war in terms of biblical images and themes ...

The expressionist Abraham Rattner ... painted the subject of lamentation several times. In his Lamentation, 1944, and Pietàs, 1945 and 1949, Rattner created a compact emblem of sorrow ... Although the war is not explicitly represented, it was implicitly understood in the frequent depictions of the crucifixion by Rattner and other artists ...

Lamentation was the formative idea of the Entombment paintings, the largest series in the early work of the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko ...

Rico Lebrun employed bestial imagery when he represented the dumb soldiers surrounding Christ as horned and armored animals in The Crucifixion, 1950 ...

Although a Jew from the Baltic like Shahn, the expressionist Bloom was a Boston artist and much more devoted than Shahn to visionary, nightmarish imagery, born of the study of Dürer's allegories, and to the work of Rouault (like Rattner and Spruance), Bresdin and Soutine ...

During the 1940s and 1950s, many artists were engaged in representing their personal responses to history ... Shahn joined these artists in coming to terms with history through allegory, myth and tradition.'

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Joanne Hogg -  I Heard The Voice Of Jesus Say.

Maciej Hoffman: the collision of thoughts with reality

All the angst of the world seems spilled out in drips, splatters and gestural brushstrokes on the huge unstretched canvases of Maciej Hoffman's current exhibition at Walthamstow's Tokarska Gallery. The distressed surfaces depict equally distressed characters with existential Expressionist force and a seeming spontaneity of style.

'Disquiet', 'Powerless', 'Nameless', 'Confused', 'Agitator'; Hoffman's titles are accurate indicators of his content. These are grandiose dramatic works full of the tension and conflict by which Hoffman is frequently seized; the collision of thoughts with reality. Stress and fear flow from the problems of the everyday through the walls of his studio to rip apart the work. Almost all his days, he says, are accompanied by stress and the fear of danger, encircled, as he is, by a world in which a price is paid for each breath. 

The child of artists, Hoffman was antagonistic to following in his parents footsteps which resulted in a "troubled" childhood. He was a teenager during the beginning of martial law in Poland. Then came the fall of communism and his immersion in the birth of Polish “capitalism, post-communism”. For fifteen years he worked for one of the biggest Polish advertisement agencies yet this freedom to use art for commercial purposes combined with the unrelenting dominance of the profit principle came to seem as much of a trap and constraint as that which he had experienced under communism. 

Hoffman is interested in art as freedom. His sense is that our control systems for classification, measurement and supervision are narrowing our space for what is irrational, imperfect or disordered. Artistic creation remains the one real margin of freedom we can use. His fluid, gestural manipulation of paint on canvas is seemingly raw, random, unfinished, and yet the emotional impact of his angst is as great as the size of the works themselves. Soutine, de Kooning, Keifer are inspirations and references but Hoffman is assuredly his own man with his own tortured vision.

Maciej Hoffman's paintings are at the Tokarska Gallery until 6 October, Thur - Sat, 12pm - 7pm.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.