Exhibitions
Twentieth Century Works from the Permanent Collection
August 31, 2010 - ongoing
Ben Shahn
Paterson, 1953
Serigraph with hand coloring in watercolor, 31 1/2 x 22 7/8 inches
Gift of Edward Joseph Gallagher, Jr.
Currently on view, works by Richard Diebenkorn, Jacob Lawrence, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, George Segal, Frank Stella, Andrew Wyeth, and others.
About the artwork shown above:
Ben Shahn became noted as a social realist during the Depression,
painting the realities of poverty, labor strikes and urban decay.
Around 1948 he was inspired by a passage from a poem titled Paterson,
written by William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine in
Rutherford, NJ. Paterson, NJ, was nicknamed "Silk City, USA" for its
dominant industry of dye-making. Shahn became fascinated with the dye
patterns in the windows of the factories, which he presents here as
colored blocks of silk. In this serigraph version, he adds ironwork at
the top of the building with a Grecian-style façade, referring to
the
ancient lineage of the art of silk-making, and also to the lines in
Williams' poem:
Without invention nothing is well spaced
...the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness...
The railroad tracks on the left of the building have been modified with elaborate lines that are spiderweb-like -- another reference to silk.
Lauren Rabb, Curator
Visit our Exhibition History page for information on past exhibitions at UAMA.