Baffling Ben

Though the public generally is unaware of him, Ben Shahn is considered by a majority of critics to be one of America's best living painters. The baffling thing about big Ben is that he has played the field, from near-realism to near-abstraction.

Last week bookstores were peddling a new and thorough biographical study of Shahn by Poet-Critic Selden Rodman (Portrait of the Artist as an American; Harper, $6.50). Rodman got most of his material from the horse's mouth, but could not make Shahn a horse of a definite color. What the book captures is the brilliant shimmer of a man too seldom at a loss. "Shahn," Rodman explains, "is a man of paradoxes."

Raised in a Brooklyn slum, Shahn struggled through 17 years as a commercial lithographer before graduating to self-expression. His most effective early works were paintings protesting the execution of Sacco & Vanzetti and the imprisonment of Tom Mooney. They had all the immediacy of snapshots.

Shahn was (and is) a candid-camera bug, not in the least reluctant to use his photographs as painting notes. Among the people who dislike his work are esthetes who think his realistic pictures overly .sentimental and sentimentalists who dislike their grimness. Shahn energetically belabors such easy targets. "Is there nothing," he roars at the esthetes, "to weep about in this world any more? Is all our pity and anger to be reduced to a few tastefully arranged straight lines or petulant squirts from a tube held over a canvas?" To the sentimentalists he says: "All the wheels of business and advertising are turning night and day to prove the colossal falsehood that America is smiling. And they want me to add my 2%. Hell, no!"

His recent works are as short of smiles as ever, but they are also short of things to weep about. As one of his friends puts it, Shahn at 53 may still have one foot in Union Square, but the other is firmly planted in the abstractionists' circle. If his latest painting, City of Dreadful Night, is a protest picture, it can only be the bleary protest of a man trying to sober up at Coney Island.

Shahn is as articulate about his new approach to art as he was about the old. "I guess I'm a mystic," he says casually. "The older I get, the more I paint from intuition. I remember one summer going out in a rowbqat and being startled by the beauty of a film of oil on the water . . . My reaction was religious."

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