'For the Sake of a Single Verse' at the Haggerty Museum of Art

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From “For the Sake of a Single Verse,” Haggerty Museum of Art

The current exhibition “For the Sake of a Single Verse” at the Haggerty Museum of Art requires one to look closely at art that was, itself, made by someone looking closely, about someone else looking ever-so-closely, at the world in front of him. The 24 lithographs by the 20th-century artist Ben Shahn illustrate scenes from the only novel by the ecstatic German writer Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

The world immediately in front of Rilke in the aughts of the 20th century was not his native Germany but the streets of Paris in all their gilded, fin-de-siècle glory, full of flaneurs strolling Haussmannized avenues along with the hookers and homeless that replaced the paramours and peasants of the ancient regime. These contradictory streets and roles fill the pages of Malte’s fictional notebooks, and their accounts reveal both the intense perceptual yearnings of a young poet and the awkward adolescence of the modern industrial city.

A generation later, Shahn made his own transformative journey to New York from what is now Lithuania. Born into a socialist-leaning, Orthodox Jewish family, Shahn was, himself, flung into the middle of the modern, urban, social imbroglio. As a teenager, he apprenticed as a lithographer, gaining an ambition for art and eventually developing into one of the America’s most notable Social Realist painters. Who better to illustrate the textual observations of another sensitive urban visionary?

The Notebooks’ prose from which the illustrations are taken is framed on the wall alongside Shahn’s suite of prints. Rilke’s text, as animated by Malte, functions as something of an obsessive to-do list of essential encounters for the aspiring poet. Shahn illustrated his folio of 24 vignettes with equivalent sensitivity. Each individual work in the exhibition features a snippet of text on the left with a corresponding illustration on the right. For example, “…to days of childhood that are left unexplained,” is matched with a simple but effective contour line drawing of six standing children under washy blocks of ultramarine and mauve. Another reads simply, “one must know the animals,” accompanied by a delightfully informal drawing of a four-legged creature walking on stabbing dashes of grass in front of a grove of stylized trees. The black and gray composition emphasizes the beast’s ribs, paws and club-like head, though very abstractly. It becomes a stand-in for every animal, which, of course, honors the spirit of the text.

Each of the lithographs in the show responds to Rilke’s words with a restraint that underscores his expansive vision, choosing dreamy contingency over didactic clarity in the way a children’s book would a graphic novel.

It’s notable that this collection of prints was executed by Shahn in 1968, a year before his death. His work is most associated with the wave of socially driven visual art that emerged after the Great Depression, but given his wise and sensitive antennae, one would assume he was absorbing and representing the tumultuous affairs confronting society at the time of this work. At a moment of such uncertainty, he chose to address the local ferment with even more openness and circumspection, both in his choice of collaborative material and in the work itself. The drawings and overall sensibilities are noticeably less direct than anything he produced in 1934, and I want to believe that in all his observational wisdom, he may have noticed the early stages of the growing mass-media leviathan that has since groped every organ of contemporary life.

Perhaps this made him reevaluate the role of the artistic witness. Who knows? It’s pure speculation. But if so, these works are a prescient warning that an abiding determination to observe and understand the spirit of our nature might supersede the act of broadcasting the letters of so many disputable facts.