whose work can be viewed in most major museums of America, was born in Lithuania in 1898 and came to America in 1906. He is known as a major Social Realist whose work in many media documents social and political causes in America with which he sympathized. From 1913-1917 he was a lithographer's apprentice, attending high school at night. Mr. Shahn later attended New York University, the City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design. A series of paintings of the trial of Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti attracted national attention.
In 1933 Mexican muralist Diego Rivera hired Shahn to assist him in the execution of the Man at the Crossroads fresco for the RCA building in Rockefeller Center, (it was later destroyed for political reasons). In the 1930s, Shahn enrolled in the New York City Public Works Project under which he did a series on the Prohibition Era. He also worked for the Farm Security Administration as an artist and photographer. Shahn and his wife Bernarda Bryson, whom he met while assisting Rivera, submitted and won a number of commissions from the WPA and the US Treasury Department for mural designs. From 1938-1939 they worked on the mural, America at Work for the Bronx post office. During World War II, Shahn designed posters for the Office of War Information and for the Congress of Industrial Organization. A prolific printmaker with an impressive graphic oeuvre, Shahn's prints, books, magazine illustrations, posters and paintings are in public and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. He died in New York City in 1969.
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