In the early 1920s, two Italian immigrants — Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti — were accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts. Despite weak evidence, they were convicted and executed in 1927. Their case became one of the most powerful symbols of social injustice and political persecution in modern American history.
One of the most passionate voices raised in their defense was not a politician or a lawyer, but an artist — Ben Shahn (1898–1969), a Lithuanian-born American painter and graphic artist. It was Shahn who helped transform the tragedy of these two workers into a moral parable about freedom, dignity, and conscience.
Art as Protest
In the early 1930s, Shahn created his famous series of drawings and lithographs, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti — a landmark in American art that merged social protest with religious symbolism.
His works were reproduced in leftist newspapers, labor union pamphlets, and protest posters.
Through these images, Shahn effectively shaped the enduring visual myth of Sacco and Vanzetti —
not merely defendants in a courtroom, but martyrs of industrial America.
Social, Not Socialist Realism
Shahn is often called a “social realist,” but in his case that meant social, not socialist. He was never an artist of the regime or an ideologue. His realism was one of empathy and civic conscience, focused on injustice and the dignity of ordinary people.
For Shahn, art was a way to speak plainly and powerfully about human rights. Although he would later become one of the key figures in American social realism, it was this series — The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti — that remained his most personal moral statement.
A Personal Understanding of Persecution
The theme of political oppression was deeply personal for Shahn. In 1902, when he was just four years old, his father was arrested by the Tsarist police in Kaunas, Lithuania, for suspected revolutionary activity and sent into exile in Siberia. He later escaped, and the family eventually emigrated to the United States.
Having grown up with stories of exile and persecution, Shahn understood all too well what it meant to be punished for one’s beliefs — and to live in defiance of authority.
Exhibition: Ben Shahn — On Nonconformity at the Jewish Museum
Fifty years after his last major retrospective, The Jewish Museum in New York presents a landmark exhibition, Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity. Featuring 175 works — paintings, prints, photographs, and posters — the show explores nonconformity as both a personal and artistic principle: the courage to remain oneself, resist pressure, and maintain a critical view of power and society.
Curators describe it as a kind of “homecoming”, since Shahn’s previous major U.S. retrospective
was also held at The Jewish Museum, back in 1976.
Visitor Information
📍 The Jewish Museum — 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York
🎟 Admission: $15, free on Saturdays
🗓 On view through October 26, 2025
