Art Art &Hubley 14 Feb 2009 09:14 am
Ounce
- I love Ben Shahn’s work and have since I first saw it in NY at a show at the Jewish Museum when I was in college. Shahn was enormously successful during the 50s, 60s & 70s; he was politically unpopular in the 80s and 90s. Now his work is considered passé by a lot of art critics since so much of it is politically motivated.
Shahn had an enormous influence on the NY crowd of the 50s, particularly those connected with the Art Student’s League. This included John and Faith Hubley, who studied painting there under Joseph Hirsch, and became closely associated with Gregorio Prestopino (who looks to have been an acolyte of Ben Shahn’s.) One can see the heavy influence of Shahn on a lot of John’s backgrounds in Adventures of an * or Moonbird.
In fact, all graphics of the 50′s and early 60s
flew off the back of Ben Shahn’s work, and it wasn’t until Peter Max and The Yellow Submarine that art, illustration and, by association, animation seriously moved away from his beautiful line work.
Recently, John Canemaker showed me a book he had in his collection which Shahn had illustrated. I have a number of them, and they all look similar. Lots of white space, careful and poised compositions, textural lines with blacks and dark greys. They’re beautiful.
I thank John for lending me the book to post. It’s large, and I won’t post all of the pages, but I will have to break it into a couple of posts if I want to display it nicely. So this is the first. Usually, I don’t post the text of the book pages, but here the type and text is as much a part of the composition as the linework.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
Here’s the house that ends Hubley’s Moonbird.
It’s part of the long pan that appears below.
on 14 Feb 2009 at 1:04 pm 1.Richard O'Connor said …
I’ve been walking around with his lectures “The Shape of Content” as my waiting room reading for the last month.
Coming up in the 90s, I never felt Shahn was out of style.
It seemed to me that the lineage of post-war (WWI) illustration starts with Shahn who leads the way to Steinberg which eventually gives us the Pushpin led explosion of the 60s.
By the 80s and 90s, the Pushpin generation represented a powerful status quo and Ben Shahn would be one their Olympian Pantheon.
on 14 Feb 2009 at 2:59 pm 2.Michael said …
I agree about Pushpin’s success (I think in some part because of the success of The Yellow Submarine’s success – definitely an imitation of Chwast & Glaser.) However, I think Steinberg’s effect on animation showed up years before in the first UPA films such as “Brotherhood of Man.”
on 15 Feb 2009 at 1:01 am 3.Bill Perkins said …
Hi Michael. Ben Shahn, who is a big favorite of mine, also had a great influence on west coast animators vis a vis Bill Moore, a design instructor at Chouinard from 1938 onwards as well, later, Cal Arts where I had him circa 1978/79. He and Harry Diamond who taught illustration are really two unsung heroes behind the modern art/design meets animation movement of the 1940′s and 1950′s . They taught generations of artists many of whom went into Animation carrying Moore/Diamonds respective design and illustration sensibilities influenced by Ben Shahn – who Moore introduced me to – Lazlo Maholy Nagy and Georges Kepes. If you can get your hands on a copy of “Chouinard – An Art Vision betrayed.” By Robert Perine it is a very insightful read about the West coast Art school that so influenced animation. It is also full on artwork reproductions where you can trace the development of styles thru decades fron the 1920′s to early 70′s. I couldn’t agree with you more about Shahn, terrific stuff.
on 15 Feb 2009 at 10:37 am 4.Michael said …
Thanks for the tip. I’ve ordered the book.