1 August 2025
Little by little with Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content, beginning with the first half of the chapter “The Biography of a Painting” in which he unpacks his work Allegory (1948).
Shahn begins by summarizing Clive Bell's view that “the representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.”
Shahn's take on this: “I have had in mind both critical views, the one which presumes a symbolism beyond or aside from the intention of a painting, and the other, that which voids the work of art of any meaning, any emotion, or any intention.”
I feel it's important to sit with this thought before going further into how Shahn digests symbols in his practice, which has already taught me a lot about forming a more generative morphological armature in my process, because it touches on something I recently spoke about with Danny—the severance of accountability from creation despite their inevitable reunification as work prepares to leave the studio.
I think what Shahn is first showing is how holding intention, audience, and any formalist leanings all at once in many ways hinges on one's devotion to honoring the subject at hand. Which I see as independent from preserving any meaning and more to do with retaining its humanity through inevitable visual extrapolation.