Lithuanian born Shahn ventured to Brooklyn with his family as a young child.

As a kid, he nurtured creative sensibilities by illustrating passages from the Old Testament. As a teenager, he worked in a lithography print shop by day and went to night school. And as a grown-up artist, he was as gifted at rendering the whimsical beauty of the everyday as he was at expressing political strife in imagery.

Shahn was never one to fear controversial subject matter. He used illustration to speak out against the injustice of the famed Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial in 1932, and in the '60’s he teamed up with a group of artists, graphic designers and art directors to design anti-H-bomb propaganda. These are just a couple of items on his protest rap sheet.

In 1933, Shahn would assist political kindred spirit Diego Rivera on a mural for New York’s RCA building. Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller and titled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future (whew), the fresco contrasted the societal horrors of fascism with a socialist paradise and featured a likeness of Lenin. Not surprisingly, Rockefeller (the ultimate capitalist) wasn’t super keen on this theme and asked Rivera to tone it down. Though Shahn and his fellow assistants threatened to strike if Rivera acquiesced, the hullabaloo proved to be futile. Not one to tolerate commie nonsense, Rockefeller halted work on the mural and sent the artists home. The unfinished painting was covered by lots of little canvases to hide it from view, and was destroyed for good the next year.

Shahn’s career didn’t limit him to radical political art, though. His talent was discovered by the ad world and he eventually came to create powerful commercial graphics. Don’t call him a sellout--while he himself once dismissed commercial illustration as an easy way to make extra cash, he came to embrace the challenge of articulating abstract ideas for the masses...even if it meant working for The Man. Hey, leftists gotta eat, too!