sport and spectatorship as everyday ritual in ben shahn's painting and photography
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Sport and Spectatorship as EverydayRitual in Ben Shahn's Painting andPhotographyJohn Fagg aa Department of American and Canadian Studies , University ofBirmingham , UKPublished online: 19 May 2011.
To cite this article: John Fagg (2011) Sport and Spectatorship as Everyday Ritual in Ben Shahn'sPainting and Photography, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 28:8-9, 1353-1369, DOI:10.1080/09523367.2011.567782
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2011.567782
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Sport and Spectatorship as Everyday Ritual in Ben Shahn’s Painting and
Photography
John Fagg*
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, UK
Ben Shahn’s paintings and photographs of sport and spectatorship made duringthe 1930s form part of a cultural discourse concerned to explore socialrelationships and everyday life in America. The position of sport within thisdiscourse is established through a discussion of Morris Kantor’s ‘Baseball atNight’ (1934), and through reference to contemporary statements and culturalhistories of the period. Close attention to Shahn’s documentary photographs ofsport, spectatorship and leisure demonstrates the way that these images fit into awider visual analysis of the conditions wrought by the Depression and the facetsof small-town life. These photographs, and the later paintings based on them,reveal the personal, ritualised qualities of sport and spectatorship as well as theirsocial significance. This shift in emphasis towards an exploration of the personal,private significance of sport in works such as ‘Vacant Lot’ (1939) correspondswith Shahn’s own account of his artistic journey through the decade.
Keywords: Ben Shahn; everyday; documentary photography; New Deal; MorrisKantor; social realism
I am aware of, as everyone else is aware of, social relationships. Now those can be onthe level of a ball game, and we know that a ball game is a very important socialrelationship. So one who would paint a ball game is making some kind of socialcomment.1
Ben Shahn’s sense of himself as ‘a social painter or photographer’ was formed in the1930s.2 Responding to the conditions of the Depression, to a widespread intellectualand cultural fascination with sociological evidence and statistics, and to the demandsof various New Deal agencies, many artists and writers during this decade turnedtheir attention to documenting everyday life. As Shahn put it, he and hiscontemporaries set out to ‘present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner’.3
Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s photographs of impoverished sharecroppersand migrant families remain the enduring icons of this endeavour. However, thephotographic project they contributed to, and indeed much of the socially consciousart of the period, sought not only to record the acute suffering caused by theDepression but to capture the contours of the ‘ordinary’ on Main Street, outside gas
*Email: [email protected]
The International Journal of the History of Sport
Vol. 28, Nos. 8–9, May–June 2011, 1353–1369
ISSN 0952-3367 print/ISSN 1743-9035 online
� 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2011.567782
http://www.informaworld.com
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stations and mom-and-pop stores, and in various forms of leisure. The photographsand paintings discussed here – which depict crowds watching baseball and horseracing, men peering through the perimeter fence at a football ground and children’simprovised games – all work to locate sport within this 1930s discourse of everydaylife in America.
Recent scholarship has done much to show that nostalgia for rural and small-town life and the need to produce propaganda images, together with the implicit andexplicit assumptions about class, region and race shared by bureaucrats and artists,worked to shape and distort 1930s documentary practice.4 Understood as theproduct of these circumstances, the visual archive of the period continues to offer anextraordinary record of what artists chose to see when asked to look for evidence ofpoverty, social relationships and the ordinary. Images of sport and spectatorshipmade on these terms hold a particular fascination because they set out to revealaspects of these subjects that are frequently elided in other kinds of visual record.For example, baseball cards, action shots and team photographs capture the starplayers and personalities of the 1930s, while the photojournalistic coverage ofbaseball in Time and Life records the spectacle of mass spectatorship, often featuringvertiginous crowd shots taken at Major League games. These images corroboratesport historians’ accounts of the decade in which organised baseball became moreorganised and more media savvy, in which Branch Rickey’s farm system and LarryMacPhail’s promotional genius, ‘reshaped the baseball marketplace, establishing anew order for a modern age’.5 Photographs and paintings made by Shahn and othersdo not necessarily contradict that story, but suggest instead an alternative vision ofsport and spectatorship in the 1930s.
Shahn depicts the boredom and absorption of individuals and whole crowds,and the experience, both insular and communal, of unorganised, informal, small-scale spectatorship and participation. As they conform to the terms and the agendaof documentary art, and as they are inextricably drawn into debates about themeaning of unproductive activity in an era of mass unemployment, these images canbe read as very specific historical documents. However, they might also beunderstood as instances in which a particular way of looking turned its attention tosport and observed in it qualities that other ways of seeing ignore. That shift, fromthe historically specific towards personal, and at the same time general or evenuniversal, experience carries particular significance in the case of Shahn. Lookingback on his work in the 1930s, Shahn described a movement from ‘‘‘social realism’’into a sort of personal realism’.6 Before tracing that journey, this essay will begin byconsidering the way that another artist, Morris Kantor, pictured sport within thetenets of American ‘social realism’. It will then turn to photographs made by Shahnwhile experimenting with his Leica camera in New York between 1932 and 1935, andwhile working for the New Deal administration between 1935 and 1938. Finally, itwill address images of sport made at the end of the decade as Shahn scoured hisphotographic archive for motifs that could be borrowed and adapted in paintingsthat move from social realism to personal realism and on to the allegorical,universalising approach that he adopted in the 1940s.7
Produced in early 1934 while the artist was on the payroll of the Public Works ofArt Project (PWAP) Morris Kantor’s ‘Baseball at Night’ (Figure 1) demonstratesthat sport and spectatorship could provide suitable material for painters working onFederal projects and within the broader context of calls for socially conscious art. Ina dramatic departure from the abstract canvases he had executed during the 1920s,
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Kantor offers a realist representation of a floodlit game at the Clarkstown CountryClub stadium, in West Nyack, New York State.8 The cropped composition andangled picture plane make the diamond almost comically compressed and crowded,suggesting, perhaps, Kantor’s lack of familiarity with the subject-matter but also hisdetermination to present a scene of comfortingly human scale. While the momentcaptured – as the pitcher winds up, about to throw – is dramatic, Kantor seems moreconcerned with the crowd, their proximity to the game, their kinship with theplayers. This crowd is picked out in sufficient detail for the spectators in theforeground to be distinguished by their facial features. As the crowd recedes furtherback the faces become blank, though each figure remains individuated byparticularities of dress, coloration and posture. The commercial photographerTheodore Horydczak’s photograph ‘World Series of 1933, Washington, D.C.Baseball Field During Last Game’, which looks down from the roof of GriffithStadium on a sea of hats, banks of indistinct people in the far stand and ant-likeplayers on the diamond, is more typical of the era’s dominant visual representationof baseball crowds.9 Such images cast baseball as a national, mass spectacle and seekto capture the excitement of the game through the exhilarating expanse of theground and the buzz generated by spectators en masse. ‘Baseball at Night’ depicts alocal, neighbourly pastime, far removed from national events such as the WorldSeries and the grand scale of Griffith Stadium or Ebbets Field.
To the left of the canvas, Kantor creates a stark opposition between the warm,bright colours that swathe the crowd on the bleachers and the pitch-black darkness
Figure 1. Morris Kantor, ‘Baseball at Night’, 1934. Oil on linen.Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Morris Kantor, 1976.146.18.
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immediately behind them. This contrast conveys the novelty and excitement of thefirst floodlit games in the 1930s where, announcer Red Barber recalled, crowds ‘lovedthe brilliantly lit park set against a background of darkness’.10 But this contrast alsosuggests an almost desperate investment in the communal glow created by the lights,the game and the crowd as a means to guard against whatever fears might lurk, inthis painting made and exhibited at the height of the Depression, out there in thesurrounding, encroaching darkness.
By emphasising the baseball ground’s role as a focal point for the everyday lifeof the community, and by seeking a visual register for communal bonds forged inthe face of threat and adversity, Kantor’s painting works to justify governmentspending on leisure and, implicitly, on cultural projects such as the PWAP. In TheMarch of Spare Time, Susan Currell explains that, while many of these projects‘were labelled as ‘‘work’’ relief, they often had as much to do with the new useof leisure time as with work’.11 The Works Progress Administration (WPA)channelled vast resources into leisure, with a considerable emphasis on theorganisation and control of leisure-time activities as well as on building sports andrecreation facilities. Currell argues that the New Deal interventions in leisurecodified distinctions between productive and unproductive leisure, and led to areorientation of the meaning of leisure time in American culture. FranklinRoosevelt used the opening of a baseball stadium in Detroit to assert the utilitarianvalue of Federal support for such projects: ‘Some people in this country havecalled it ‘‘boondoggling’’ for us to build stadiums and parks. . . . My friends, if thisstadium can be called boondoggling, then I am for boondoggling, and so are you.’12 Similar charges of boondoggling were also levelled at the PWAP and subsequentFederal art projects, which were required to justify themselves on similarlyutilitarian grounds.
Federal support for art was intended to provide relief for unemployed artists butalso to create murals for public buildings, easel painting exhibitions accessible tobroad audiences, and lithographs and etchings that could be cheaply and widelydisseminated. This emphasis on the democratic expansion of culture suggests furtheranalogies between the circumstances in which Kantor produced his painting and thetreatment of his subject. The floodlights, which enabled working people to attendnight games, were still a relatively new innovation in 1934. Kantor links them toanother innovation, represented by the radio broadcasting station in the top leftcorner of the canvas. The rays emanating from the lights recall the famous RKOlogo, insinuating a connection between floodlights and radio, which bothrepresented new means of reaching out to wider audiences.
Cultural historian Susan Douglas provides a lyrical description of the ‘warm,enfolding memories . . . shared by millions . . . who fell asleep, or mowed the lawn,or tinkered at a workbench, or drove around while listening to baseball on the radio’during this period. Quoting a journalist’s assertion that ‘Radio has really madebaseball the national game’, Douglas suggests that ‘Sports on the air may have beenthe most important agent of nationalism in American culture in the 1920s and1930s’.13 A 1942 Time magazine report captures the communal excitement generatedby baseball on the radio in this period: ‘In US drugstores, barbershops, lunchwagons, parlors and pool halls, over 25,000,000 radio listeners will cock their earsnext week to listen to three men – the sportscasting trio that broadcasts the WorldSeries.’14 Again, moving from the national to the local, Kantor invokes thisunderstanding of baseball as a source of community cohesion, hinting at a small
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band of listeners drawn into the game at the Clarkstown Country Club by the (local)radio waves just as the crowd at the ground are encircled by the floodlit glow.
In a 1934 Scribner’s article the painter George Biddle reflected on the PWAP,which he had been instrumental in organising. He argued that ‘In our painting .. . there is this social self-awareness which is so different from the earnest, egotisticindividualism of the rebels of fifteen or twenty years ago’. To support his claim thatthis ‘social self awareness’ represented an increasingly ‘universal conviction’ both inthe art-world and American culture as a whole, Biddle cites ‘the growing popularinterest in such books as Middletown, Stuart Chase’s Men and Machines and LewisMumford’s and Van Wyck Brooks’ criticisms of American Civilisation’.15 Publishedin 1929, Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culturewas particularly influential in popularising a ‘sociological’ interpretation ofAmerican life and suggests various ways in which leisure and sport might beunderstood in such terms. In Muncie, Indiana – the anonymised Midwestern citythat the Lynds selected for its supposed ‘averageness’ – the high-school basketballteam served as a powerful source of community cohesion:
Today more civic loyalty centers around basket-ball than around any other one thing.No distinctions divide the crowds which pack the school gymnasium for homegames . . . North Side and South Side, Catholic and Kluxer, banker and machinist –their one shout is ‘Eat ’em, beat ’em, Bearcats!’ 16
Kantor’s ‘Baseball at Night’ provides a striking example of a painting imbued withthis understanding of the local, social meaning of sport.
A year after the termination of the PWAP, the Whitney Museum of American Artstaged the exhibition ‘American Genre: The Social Scene in Paintings and Prints 1800–1935’. The ground floor comprised a survey of the nineteenth-century genre paintingtradition, while the first floor gallery was given over to the early-twentieth-centuryAshcan School and works by contemporary regionalist and social realist paintersincluding Kantor and Shahn. Conservative art critics reviewing the exhibition took theopportunity to set the celebration of American everyday life that they found in thenineteenth-century works against the perceived failings of contemporary artists. ForRoyal Cortissoz, ‘Downstairs, where the older work is on view, all is romance,prosperity, sentiment andpeace. . . . A shortwalkup the stairs and thevisitor is landed inthe midst of bitterness . . . and the horrors of life in the megalopolis.’17 The claim thatartists had become too citified, or too pessimistic, to engage with ordinary American lifewas a frequent accusation during this period, despite the new-found ‘social awareness’that Biddle identified.
In a similar vein, Mary Morsell complained that among the contemporary artistsincluded in ‘American Genre’,
even those of minor talents scorn to record the steady rhythm of American bourgeoislife still devoted to its favorite routine pursuits despite the depression. The prize fight, itmust be admitted, claims several canvases, but where are baseball and golf and fishingand camping, which still figure prominently as national pastimes . . . where are themillions of movie fans and the farmers who sit with their families in their electricallylighted parlors, listening with childlike pleasure to the radio during winter evenings?
Although Kantor did not show ‘Baseball at Night’ at the Whitney, he wasrepresented by another painting, ‘At the Races’ (1934, location unknown), which,
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with its foreground emphasis on well-dressed spectators and vast grandstands in thebackground, might similarly have checked this critique. Morsell, perhaps strategi-cally, overlooked this work. Her review, subtitled ‘American Life Richly Reflected inthe XIXth Century Works: Our Introverted Contemporaries Cling to FourteenthStreet’, is primarily an attack on the so-called Fourteenth Street School painters –Isabel Bishop, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh and Raphael Soyer – who, sheclaimed, ‘delude themselves that Bagdad-by-the-Subway with its capital enshrined inthe chaos of East Fourteenth Street is still a cosmos in itself’.18
Laning and Soyer were involved with the Communist Party-affiliated John ReedClub during the early 1930s and, while the Fourteenth Street School did not espousea shared or, indeed, directly stated political agenda, their response to the Depressionwas not to seek out evidence of ‘the steady rhythm of American bourgeois life’.Between 1933 and 1935 Bishop, Marsh and Soyer all painted unemployed menhuddled at the base of the Washington Monument or lounging on benches in UnionSquare.19 Soyer’s ‘In the City Park’ (1934, private collection) depicts weary,crumpled men in various states of collapse and offers stark evidence of the effects ofmass unemployment. But, as Andrew Hemingway observes, because they ‘signifyprimarily boredom, lassitude and defeat’, such images held little political value forthose on the Left who sought representations of politicised workers and anawakening of militant consciousness.20 Fourteenth Street School paintings ofinactive men register the damage caused by mass unemployment but tend not toengage in wider social and political critique.
Between 1932 and 1935 Ben Shahn conducted extended experiments in streetphotography around Fourteenth Street and Union Square. Shahn was good friendswith Soyer, and would later include a portrait of the painter among the crowd ofnewly arrived immigrants in his ‘Jersey Homestead Mural’ (1937–8).21 The twoartists shared a neighbourhood, a circle of friends and acquaintances, and loosepolitical affiliations to the Left.22 Shahn’s street photographs match Soyer’s concernto individuate figures within the sidewalk crowd, while his studies of men on benchesin Seward Park share aspects of dress, pose and demeanour, as well as a sense of‘boredom, lassitude and defeat’, with ‘In the City Park’. Shahn recorded numerousinstances of lounging and loitering in this neighbourhood as well as more activepastimes such as shopping and, famously, handball. The multiple shots that Shahntook in the Houston Street Playground and later reworked in the tempera painting‘Handball’ (1939, Museum of Modern Art) complicate the meaning of inactivity andenforced leisure.
Figures in the photographs and subsequent painting adopt loitering postures;the milieu is that of Fourteenth Street School studies of the unemployed, and theimprovised game of handball is far removed from the organised, community-building leisure advocated by the New Deal administration or the bourgeois‘national pastimes’ identified by Morsell. Shahn’s commitment to ‘social paintingor photography’ and the ‘social relationships’ implicit in a ball game ground thevitality depicted in these images in questions of class and society. Did ‘the steadyrhythm of American . . . life’ celebrated in Depression era visual representationshave to be ‘bourgeois’? Was leisure only ‘productive’ if it was officiallysanctioned? Post-war critics concerned to distance Shahn from such questionsand from the social art of the New Deal era identified a transcendent grace in histempera rendering of these the handball players: James Thrall Soby describes the‘springy stance of the youth in the right foreground of Handball’ as
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‘unforgettable’; John Szarkowski observed ‘asymmetrical, ceremonial figures,floating elegantly in . . . shallow, shadowless space’.23 The tension suggested by thehandball photographs and heightened in the later painting – between sport as anexpression of social conditions in which it is played and watched and sport as aform of personal transcendence and escape – would recur in Shahn’s subsequentrepresentations of sport and spectatorship.
In the late spring of 1935 Shahn was employed by the WPA’s Special Skills unitand then detailed to the Historical Section of the Resettlement and Farm SecurityAdministrations (RA and FSA). Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Langeand Shahn’s close friend Walker Evans were all sent out by the Historical Sectionchief, Roy Emerson Stryker, to embark on long road trips to record the effects of theDepression in rural America. While Shahn’s terms of employment and connection toStryker differed slightly from that of the other photographers, he was essentiallyfollowing the same brief. Maren Stange explains that the purpose of these trips wasthe ‘establishment of a file of useful and authoritative photographs’ that could bedeployed in government initiatives and by commercial publications to illustrate theimpact of the Depression. John Raeburn expands on this point, identifying threedistinct categories of ‘useful’ photographs – ‘record shots, news and documentary’ –and detailing the way that the definition of a ‘useful’ picture changed substantiallybetween the initial trips made in 1935 and the later work of the project.24 Recallingthe experience, Shahn described the effect these road trips had on him: ‘Off I wentand, boy, that shook me up. I took a lot of pictures and photographed a lot and drewa lot. I realized that everything I had gotten about the condition of miners or cottonpickers I had gotten on Fourteenth Street. I found realities that I had no ideaabout.’25 Mary Morsell would doubtless have been pleased to learn of Shahn’sexpanded horizons, though not, at least initially, of the conclusions he drew from histravels. The institutional demands of this documentary project, together with therevelatory effect that it had on Shahn as an individual, help to explain thephotographs he took in 1935 and their subsequent reworking into paintings.
Shahn started by photographing mining towns, travelling from West Virginiathrough to Arkansas before heading south to the cotton plantations of Mississippiand Louisiana. As in his New York street photography experiments, he tookmultiple shots of subjects that caught his attention and frequently used a ‘Winko’right-angle viewfinder that, together with his lightweight Leica camera, enabled himto take ‘candid’ photographs of unwitting subjects. In contrast to these earlierexperiments, Shahn was methodical in his FSA work, taking distance shots thatestablish the location of a community and then moving in to record particulardetails, or taking sequences of photographs that construct concise narratives of, forexample, a crowd gathering for a medicine show in Huntingdon, Tennessee.26 In StarCity, West Virginia Shahn took a series of pictures of middle-aged men lookingthrough cracks in a wooden fence through which only vague shapes are legible to thephotographer and viewer. In one photograph a tall, cigarette-smoking man turns tothe camera, apparently aware of Shahn’s presence and seemingly angered by theintrusion. All of the other figures are shown with their backs to the camera, theirfaces pressed against the fence. Of the three studies preserved in the Library ofCongress files, it is the starkest, listed as ‘Untitled’ and featuring just two figurespositioned at the edges of the frame with the centre of the composition given over tothe blank fence (Figure 2), that Shahn later chose to rework as the tempera painting‘Sunday Football’ (1938, private collection).27 Only the later painting’s title and
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Shahn’s caption for the other photographs taken of the same scene – ‘Watchingfootball game, Star City, West Virginia’ – reveal what is taking place here.
Shahn’s photographs cast spectatorship as a lonely, alienated practice, especiallywhen set against the glowing communal activity of Kantor’s ‘Baseball at Night’. Themen seem profoundly isolated: their view of the game is, at best, partial and the fenceseparates them from the shared experience of the paying crowd; as each man has tosquint through his own narrow crack in the fence they are cut off from one anotheras well as from the photographer and viewer, who see only the back of their heads.The images are striking for the lack of information they contain. They share theausterity and absence of depth and contextual detail that mark Evans’s photographsof sharecropper families positioned in front of the boards of their wooden shacks,but refuse to reveal the faces that made those works iconic. However, despite theirstark, ambiguous composition, their thematic concern with a peculiarly isolatedform of spectatorship, and their oblique connection to the immediate social effects ofthe Depression, these photographs can be positioned within the terms of Shahn’s andthe Historical Section’s documentary project. Specifically, they can be read ascontribution to the systemic study of forms of inactivity that Shahn conducted in themining towns.
In ‘Scene in Omar, West Virginia’, five men sit hunched in a row along a kerb.28
With splayed feet and chins resting on hands the men’s demeanour suggests that theyhave not moved for some time. Three men turn their heads to look down the roadwith the implication that they are waiting for something to arrive. However, theimage gives little indication of what the men are waiting for, or how long their waitmight continue. The apparent discomfort of sitting on the kerb, and the absence of
Figure 2. Ben Shahn, ‘Untitled’, 1935. Photograph.Source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-USF33- 006119-M1.
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any form of work or entertainment to occupy the men, suggests stasis, limbo.Whatever the precise nature of their circumstances, the waiting men are engaged inwhat Joe Moran defines as a process ascribed ‘low economic and cultural value’:‘Wealth and status in advanced capitalist societies rest on the capacity to accumulateresources such as money, skills, knowledge and information. Waiting is the oppositeof this kind of accumulated resource: it is simply the passing of time, time that couldbe spent doing something more useful.’29 Captioned ‘Striking miners, Scotts Run,West Virginia’ and later reworked as a tempera painting, ‘Scott’s Run, WestVirginia’ (1937, Whitney Museum of American Art), a photograph taken in aneighbouring town depicts a different kind of waiting.30 A group of men stand in ayard near a coal train. Their hands are in their pockets and they seem rooted to thespot. The reference to a strike in Shahn’s caption imbues their inactivity with aparticular kind of agency, but even without the text, the tension in their bodies andthe fixedness of their stares makes it apparent that these men are not simply loitering.
The Star City ‘watching football’ photographs occupy an awkward position onthis spectrum of purposeful and purposeless inactivity. Like the earlier Union Squarestudies of unemployed men, and ‘Scene in Omar, West Virginia’, these photographsdepict a marginal, desperate situation haunted by the spectre of mass unemploy-ment. As the Lynds observed upon their return to ‘Middletown’ during theDepression years, ‘enforced leisure drowned men with its once-coveted abundance,and its taste became sour and brackish’.31 But the men’s absorption in sport andtheir involvement in unseen events on the other side of the fence – like the athleticismof the boys playing handball in the Houston Street Playground – differentiates themfrom those who simply sit and wait. Placed alongside the striking miners at ScottsRun, these men can be seen to be enacting a form of agency, opting out of the officialform of leisure and choosing to view the game on their own terms. By refusing topay, by finding ingenious alternatives to the proscribed social order, the men engagein a kind of low-level, small-scale everyday resistance. The photographs andsubsequent painting can thus be seen as evidence of ‘the steady rhythm of American[working-class] life still devoted to its favorite routine pursuits despite thedepression’, of ingenuity’s triumph over despair rather than despair itself.
While Shahn expressed his support for the aims of the Historical Section, he alsoacknowledged that much of his work was not intended for the FSA’s stock of ‘usefuland authoritative photographs’: ‘The things I photographed, I did not think so muchas photographs, as documents for myself. A lot of paintings came out of it over theyears.’32 Throughout Shahn’s archive, and especially in the photographs that herevisited to make paintings such as ‘Sunday Football’, there is an attention to lesstangible, less obviously ‘useful’ details that carry humorous, sentimental and tragicconnotations. There is, for instance, a bitter-sweet humour in the sight of grown menpeeking through a fence. Watching baseball in this way was understood as a child’sprerogative in the 1930s, as acknowledged by the ‘Knothole Clubs’ established by theYankees and other teams during the decade that let youngsters into the stadium forfree. The motif also carries a long association with sentimental representations ofsmall-town America that run at least from William Hahn’s ‘It’s My Turn’ (1868,Oakland Museum) – in which boys clamber onto one another to peer into a circustent – to Norman Rockwell’s 30 August 1958 Saturday Evening Post cover – in whichthe viewer glimpses a pitcher winding up through a lovingly rendered knothole.Through these associations the men photographed by Shahn are at once connectedto a more innocent time and place, and infantilised.
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Stu Cohen explains that the vision of ‘ordinary’ America that Roy Stryker urgedon his documentary photographers was ‘couched in . . . a persistent yearning for theranches, farms, and small towns of his childhood and youth’ and that ‘Stryker’swork with the New Deal located him at the center of its paradoxical nostalgia forsmall-town values and farm-family individualism’. These sentiments were shared bymany of the photographers, including Shahn who, while ‘city-bred . . . had anessential understanding and sympathy for things rural’.33 A similar vein of nostalgiaruns through John Wheelwright’s 1933 article, ‘Remington and Winslow Homer’,which offers a more nuanced account of the loss of connection to ordinary Americanlife in contemporary painting bemoaned by those commenting on the ‘AmericanGenre’ exhibition, and treats the visual representation of sport with greatersophistication than Morsell’s call for pictures of ‘baseball and golf and fishing andcamping’. ‘Remington and Winslow Homer’ was published in the Hound & Horn, aHarvard journal of arts and letters edited by Shahn’s close friend Lincoln Kirstein.Kirstein was an influential voice in the 1930s art-world, working with Alfred Barr tofound the Museum of Modern Art and, through his journal and other publications,promoting and theorising two of the decade’s defining art-forms, photography andmural painting.34 Wheelwright’s argument is worth considering at some length herebecause it places sport at the centre of an early attempt to identify appropriatesubject-matter for 1930s social art and offers useful clues as to what Shahn and hiscontemporaries might have seen in photographs of small-town men watchingfootball through a fence.
Wheelwright begins by invoking Winslow Homer’s paintings of fishing andcamping scenes, such as the watercolours ‘Boy Fishing’ (1892, San Antonio Museumof Art) – which depicts a lone figure casting his line and netting a fish in a serene,bucolic setting – and ‘Camp Fire, Adirondacks’ (c.1892, Art Institute of Chicago) –which was included in the ‘19th Century’ section of the Whitney’s ‘American Genre’exhibition: ‘In middle life Winslow Homer withdrew from the world to thepreoccupations of his boyhood, the sturdy unathletic boyhood of the America beforethe Civil War, when he liked to hunt and fish, to observe the behavior of naturalforms and to make pictures of what he saw and did.’ He then suggests that Homerturned to these subjects because
A painter who handles ideas and is capable of handling more than one idea at a timemust deal in ritual. Americans as a people lacked the sense of pathos, the habitualfamiliarity with tragedy, to give any social ritual full meaning excepting one, the ritualwhich acts out Man’s primal combat with beasts and elements.35
Arguing that ruptures to the fabric of everyday life and the loss of connection tonature caused by early twentieth-century modernisation meant that American artistshad ‘lost the subject-matter of their greatest painter’, Wheelwright urged con-temporary painters to seek out new forms of ritual. Listing the deficiencies andlimitations of urban sporting rituals including baseball, football, prize-fighting andwrestling, he concludes that ‘the subject-matters of sport are trifles’ and that instead,‘The American painter of ritual must base himself on the everyday’. Wheelwright’sprogramme for such a painting includes ‘The daily life of workers and farmers,country auctions of foreclosed farms, nocturnal street meetings, picket lines andbread lines, industrial or governmental massacres’.36
Shahn’s ‘watching football’ photographs work to mediate between the somewhatconfused terms of Wheelwright’s essay. Spectatorship is located on a spectrum of
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unproductive practices – between waiting and picketing – and so forms part ofWheelwright’s ‘everyday’. But Shahn also imbues his work with some of the ritualsignificance that Wheelwright and more recent commentators identify in WinslowHomer’s hunting and fishing scenes. Sarah Burns observes that nineteenth-centuryresponses to the ‘fraternal world of carefully ritualised wilderness experience’depicted in Homer’s studies of fishing suggest that ‘while anyone might respond tothe beauty of his angling scenes, only true initiates – club members – couldunderstand them’.37 Shahn’s watching men carry some sense of a fraternal bond,sharing a method of watching the game without paying and a knowledge of what ishappening on the other side of the fence that is kept from the uninitiatedphotographer and viewer. In Shahn’s tempera reworking of the scene as ‘SundayFootball’, the two watching men become squat, hunched, rooted figures, that,together with the title’s suggestion that this is a weekly occurrence, create an imageof a fixed, intransient ritual.
The Historical Section rapidly moved beyond the narrowly defined propagandaremit with which it was established in 1935. John Raeburn explains that
The publicity mission remained, but the practical impetus coexisted with others that hadbecome at least as central; to quicken sympathy for the depression’s victims, to rangebroadly and widely enough to make its file a historical archive of thirties culture ratherthan merely a record of the agencies’ activities, and to establish its visibility inphotography’s art world.38
In seeking to establish an ‘archive of thirties culture’, Stryker consulted Middletownco-author Robert Lynd and began to produce ‘shooting scripts’ that askedphotographers to make pictures relating to ‘broadly ethnographic’ categories notwholly dissimilar to those advocated by Wheelwright in his list of everyday subjects,and that, from 1937, placed a particular emphasis on the vitality of small-townAmerica.39
In the summer of 1938, while staying with his wife’s family in Ohio and waiting tostart work on a mural project, Shahn requested an assignment from Stryker thatwould enable him to record ‘the Average American’ rather than those worst hit bythe Depression. While this suggests an expanded artistic sympathy of the kindMorsell urged upon New York artists, Shahn’s understanding of ‘average’ did notequate to ‘bourgeois’, and his photographs do not adopt the boosterish tone ofStryker’s celebrations of small-town America. Instead, Shahn set out to produce amethodical, systematic visual account of various facets of life in small Ohio townssuch as Lancaster and London. In his detailed analysis of these studies, Raeburnobserves that, while ‘some emphasize the congeniality of downtown areas . . . asmany suggest a banal utilitarianism or somnolent listlessness’.40 The studies ofleisure, sport and spectatorship that Shahn made around these towns, including‘Before start of weight-pulling contest, county fair, central Ohio’, ‘Crowd at horserace, Lancaster, Ohio’ and ‘Watching a baseball game, central Ohio’ (1938), conveythis same sense of banality and listlessness in compositions marked by the flatnessand lack of defined focal point that critics have identified as a formal strain runningthrough much of his photography.41
During the summer that Shahn worked on his survey of Ohio towns, Lifemagazine dispatched William Vandivert, a regular contributor and practitioner ofcandid-camera photography, to cover ‘Ladies Day’ at Wrigley Field, Chicago. Thethree page photo-essay begins with an establishing shot taken, like Theodore
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Horydczak’s 1933 Griffith Stadium photograph, from high in the stands to show themassed crowds and distant players. The scene-setting text gives a brief history of thepromotional event and claims that on the day documented by Vandivert, ‘40,000females came to Ladies Day, broke turnstiles in an unladylike brawl for seats’.42 Thelargest photograph in the piece is an overhead shot looking down on the bleachers.As in the famous photographs of Coney Island that Weegee made in the late 1930sand early 1940s, some members of the crowd look up to acknowledge thephotographer while others remain oblivious. In contrast to Kantor’s depiction of theindividuated, neighbourly crowd in ‘Baseball at Night’, and to the decidedly small-scale, low-key baseball game that Shahn observed in central Ohio, the impressioncreated by Vandivert’s image is of an overwhelming, anonymous and seeminglyuniform mass. On the final page, four apparently candid photographs taken from thesame position track the changing emotions of a section of the crowd as theCubs rally before eventually being beaten by the Cincinnati Reds. Claspedhands, raised arms, open mouths and abandoned hats tell of heightened emotions.For Life, the visual appeal of a baseball game lies in the scale of the stadium and themassed crowds, the way that spectators’ reactions can be made to tell the story of thegame, and the humorous, human interest narratives generated by the event. Thisapproach at once connects with and, as suggested, differs from the way that Kantordepicted his small-scale baseball crowd and from Shahn’s emphasis on ‘socialrelationships’ at a ball game. The people in the crowd matter to Life, but as a sourceof spectacle and ‘character’ rather than as evidence of community cohesion orindividual alienation.
In his 1938 photographs Shahn shows neither spectacle nor community. Shot athead height, from a position behind the crowd, ‘Watching a baseball game, centralOhio’, like the ‘Watching football game, Star City’ photographs, presents a rear viewof men absorbed in an unseen sporting contest. While faces are largely obscured, themen here stand together, and look together, at the action. This image of anonymous,uniform group spectatorship is interrupted by the two faces revealed to the camera, asleeping baby and a woman who turns her distracted gaze toward something off tothe left of the frame. The woman’s distraction reinforces the sense of the men’sengagement and calls attention to individual difference, to lives lived apart from, aswell as in relation to, communal experience. Two further, untitled, photographspreserved in the Library of Congress archive appear to have been taken at the samecentral Ohio baseball game. One shows the players in action, but with no onewatching them, while the other captures a pause in the game and a thin fringe ofspectators.43 As in the many other crowds that Shahn photographed in Ohio,individuals seem dislocated from one another but connected by their absorption inthe event.
In ‘Horse race, Lancaster, Ohio’ several members of the three-deep crowd adoptbent, strained, neck-craning positions as if their fellow spectators are an obstacle thatthey must overcome to see the race.44 Shahn devoted considerable attention tocrowds at county fairs and, while many of these photographs are frontal shots orportraits, a striking number are taken from behind small groups of spectators. Theseworks show people absorbed in a single activity, but through differences in postureand attitude suggest individual rather than collective identities. Repeating thestrategy used in the ‘watching football’ photographs, Shahn denies the viewer accessto the spectacle being watched, to evidence of relationships within the crowd, and tothe faces that became privileged markers of identity in so many other 1930s
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documentary photographs. While, at Wrigley Field, Vandivert sought to make thefemale spectators’ shared excitement palpable, and, at the Clarkstown CountryClub, Kantor emphasised communal engagement, Shahn’s photographs ofspectators at weight-pulling contests at county fairs, horse races and small-scalebaseball games preserve a sense of mystery as to what draws people together anddraws them into watching sport. Shahn’s investment here is in the tics and traits andprivate rituals of the individuals that make up the crowd and their diverse, personalresponses to the event they observe.
Reflecting on his documentary photography experiences, Shahn wrote that hehad
crossed and recrossed many sections of the country, and had come to know well somany people of all kinds of belief and temperament, which they maintained with atranscendent indifference to their own lot in life. Theories had melted before suchexperience. My own painting then turned from what is called ‘social realism’ into a sortof personal realism. I found the qualities of people a constant pleasure.45
The Houston Street Playground and ‘watching football’ photographs and, in a moresustained manner, the studies of crowds in Ohio, show absorption in sport as a
Figure 3. Ben Shahn, ‘Vacant Lot’, 1939. Watercolour and gouache on paper mounted onplywood panel.Source: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary CatlinSumner Collection Fund.
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ritualised form of individual expression that occurs within, and carries thepotential for transcendence and escape from, the banal, everyday world. Whileworking on ‘Resources of America: Walt Whitman’ (1938–9), ‘The Meaning ofSocial Security’ (1940–2) and other large mural projects, Shahn began producingwhat he would refer to as ‘Sunday Paintings’. These are small-scale works, madeoutside the institutional contexts of public mural and FSA documentaryphotography, and give full expression to the sense of personal realism andindividual ritual that Shahn’s photographs and photographic expeditions hadrevealed. ‘Handball’ and ‘Sunday Football’ were made as ‘Sunday Paintings,’ as was‘Vacant Lot’, (1939, Figure 3).
Based on an untitled photograph made around 1934 during his New Yorkstreet photography experiments, ‘Vacant Lot’, like ‘Sunday Football’, is a quiet,stark representation of solitary absorption in sport. In a 1944 interview, Shahndescribed the process of moving from photograph to painting – in which heremoved two foreground figures and other details – as one first of abstracting thefigure or ‘problem’ and then of creating dramatic forms – ‘the big and littlerelationships of color and tone . . . the big red brick wall dwarfing the boy playingball all alone’.46 That wall, and the rubble-strewn lot on which the boy standswith his back turned to the viewer, locate the scene within a degraded urbanenvironment and thus the impoverished conditions of the Depression. Butbetween photograph and painting Shahn’s concern shifted from social relation-ships to aesthetic ones. Where the source photograph works to document thatenvironment, the painting strips away much of the detail, preserving only thetexture of the wall and the spatial relationships of wall, lot and boy. Lifting himout of his social circumstances, the painting imagines this boy repeatedlythrowing up a stone then swinging his bat, the ritual of coming to the vacant lotto practise, and the compulsion – perfectionism, failure, rejection – that leads himto practise alone. It thus carries some of the pathos and ‘the habitual familiaritywith tragedy’ that John Wheelwright found in Winslow Homer and missed in thework of his contemporaries. Indeed, in positioning a lone youth within an empty,serene setting, ‘Vacant Lot’ conjures the same atmosphere of intense, individualritual as Winslow Homer’s ‘Boy Fishing’. At the same time, the motif alsoresonates with the sentimentalised, nostalgic strain that ran through documentaryphotography and other representations of everyday life in the 1930s. In 1936Norman Rockwell explained that ‘The commonplaces of America are to me therichest subjects in art. Boys batting flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jackson the front steps’.47 Social, personal, nostalgic, sentimental and universalisingways of seeing sport all shape Shahn’s ‘Vacant Lot’.
‘Vacant Lot’ is imbued with a sense of leisure not as unproductive time, nor as autilitarian means to community cohesion, but as something at once socially valuableand highly personal. Shahn came to this sense of sport through an artistic processand set of political concerns that encouraged him to perceive sport in relation to itssocial context. The 1930s occasioned a sustained exploration of the socialsignificance of leisure and, at the same time, of the documentary and social artforms that might reveal and elucidate this significance. The pathos that Shahn findsin images of individuals absorbed in sport and spectatorship, in boys ‘batting flies’and men peering through fences at football games and craning their necks at horseraces, stems from an understanding of these activities as ritualised occurrences withinordinary, everyday life.
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Note on Contributor
John Fagg is a lecturer in the Department of American and Canadian Studies atthe University of Birmingham and is the author of On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, GeorgeBellows and Modernism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009). His currentproject is provisionally titled ‘Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1900–1940’.
Notes
1. Ben Shahn, interview with Nadya Aisenberg for ‘Invitation to Learning’, WJBH-FM,Boston, 1957, quoted in Morse, Ben Shahn, 42–3.
2. Shahn quoted in Kao et al., Ben Shahn’s New York, 1. On the widespread discourse of‘the social’ across the arts in America in this period see, Peeler, Hope Among Us Yet.
3. Morse, Ben Shahn, 133.4. See for example Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, 89–131, and Rabinowitz, ‘Voyeurism and
Class Consciousness’.5. Tygiel, Pastime, 115.6. Morse, Ben Shahn, 80–1.7. On Shahn’s late style see Chevlowe, Common Man, Mythic Vision.8. See Prentice Wagner, 1934: A New Deal for Artists, 102.9. Horydczak Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, call number LC-H822-
1751-013, available online at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/thc/.10. Tygiel, Pastime, 101.11. Currell, The March of Spare Time, 51.12. Quoted in Kossuth, ‘Boondoggling, Baseball, and the WPA’, 60.13. Douglas, Listening In, 199–200.14. ‘Radio: 50,000,000 Ears’, Time, 28 Sept. 1942.15. George Biddle, ‘An Art Renascence under Federal Patronage’, Scribner’s Magazine 95
(June 1934), 428.16. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 485.17. R. Cortissoz, ‘American Life Art Exhibition on View Here’, New York Herald Tribune,
27 March 1935, 15.18. M. Morsell, ‘Whitney Museum Holds Exhibition of Genre Painting’, American Art
News, 30 March 1935, 3, 5.19. For discussion of these works see Todd, The ‘New Woman’ Revised, 131–5.20. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 71–2.21. Linden, ‘Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals’, 48.22. Hemingway suggests that for Soyer and others the JRC provided ‘a political education’
(Artists on the Left, 21) but not an induction into the Communist Party and describesShahn as ‘not a communist, but an independent left liberal’ (ibid., 211).
23. Soby, Ben Shahn, 5–6; John Szarkowski quoted in Kao et al., Ben Shahn’s New York,32.
24. Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, 108; Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 151, 169–70.25. Oral history interview with Ben Shahn, 3 Oct. 1965, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-inter-view-ben-shahn-12500.
26. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.Library of Congress, Washington, DC, call number LC-USF3301-006166-M4, availableonline at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/. For a detailed discussion ofShahn’s working practices on his 1935 trip, and of his commitment to ‘images thatpointed to the concrete effects that a labour system . . . had on real people’, see Edwards,‘Ben Shahn: The Road South’, 16.
27. Farm Security Administration, LC-USF33- 006119-M2, LC-USF33- 006120-M5, LC-USF33- 006119-M1.
28. Farm Security Administration, LC-USF33- 006202-M3.29. Moran, Reading the Everyday, 8.30. Farm Security Administration, LC-USF33-006124-M5.31. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 246.
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32. Oral history interview with Ben Shahn, 14 April 1964, Archives of American Art,Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-inter-view-ben-shahn-12760.
33. Cohen, The Likes of Us, xv.34. Wheelwright, ‘Remington and Winslow Homer’; on Kirstein, Wheelwright and the
Hound & Horn, see Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 122–45; on Shahn’s influence on Kirstein,see Kao et al., Ben Shahn’s New York, 71–2.
35. Wheelwright, ‘Remington and Winslow Homer’, 611, 616.36. Ibid., 631.37. Burns, ‘‘‘To Make You Proud of Your Brother’’’, 27.38. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 70.39. On Stryker’s emphasis on and investment in small towns, see Raeburn, Ben Shahn’s
American Scene, 5–13.40. Ibid., 10.41. Farm Security Administration, LC-USF33- 006659-M4, LC-USF33- 006409-M1, LC-
USF33- 006516-M5. Fleischhauer and Brannan observe that in much of Shahn’s work,‘The plane of focus is not always on the subject of greatest interest’ (DocumentingAmerica, 77).
42. W. Vandivert, ‘Speaking of Pictures – Ladies Day at Ball Park’, Life 5, no. 4 (25 July1938), 5.
43. Farm Security Administration, LC-USF33- 006516-M4, LC-USF33- 006516-M1.44. Farm Security Administration, LC-USF33- 006409-M5.45. Morse, Ben Shahn, 80–81.46. Ibid., 61.47. Moffat, ‘The People’s Painter’, 24.
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