A Favorite Painting 19

Ben Shahn, Handball 1939

Ben Shahn was an artist of the common man, to put it in the parlance of the 1930s. As a painter, illustrator, and photographer, his work was very much in the documentary tradition of social realism and it's safe to say that most of it conveyed some message related to notions of equality or basic human dignity. This painting, which I saw in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is less overtly political than much of Shan's work, but nonetheless fits comfortably into his body of work. One of the things I find striking about it is the way it isolates (against that big white wall) simple play in the midst of the big city, suggesting a degree of control by the players in defining their place within that environment. It was a common theme in American culture up to that point to portray the city as oppressive and demeaning, especially in contrast to the more bucolic rural or frontier images that shaped much of the common American sense of national identity (these themes are explored in works like Henry Nash's Virgin Land, R.W.B. Lewis' American Adam, and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden). Shahn's painting, to me, offers refutation of that premise and restores to his subjects not only a degree of agency in shaping the parameters of their life in the urban environment, but also a capacity to reshape the conditions of that environment to their own end. I don't think it's coincidence that the wall of the handball court is painted in such a way to convey an almost infinite background; in that way it somewhat replicates the more pastoral elements of the baseball diamond, whose foul lines stretch, theoretically, forever. To conjure that kind of "infinite space" within the confines of a city block is an act of imagination that matches those that motivated the early pioneers to see what was on the other side of the mountains, propelling the nation's expansion and providing the framework for the agrarian ideal that cities were presumed to threaten.