BERNARDA BRYSON SHAHN (1903-2004)
The artist/activist/author/teacher Bernarda Bryson was born in Athens, Ohio, on March 7, 1903. Her family had a tradition of social responsibility: her mother taught Latin at Ohio University; her father owned The Athens Morning Journal; and the home of her grandfather, Laurentius Weethee, was a station on the underground railroad before the Civil War. Bryson attended Ohio University, Ohio State University, Western Reserve University, the Cleveland School of Art where she studied painting, and lithography, and later, the New School for Social Research, in New York.
The first prints made by Bryson date to her association with Russell Limbach at the Cleveland School of Art in 1928. In addition to her urban views of Cleveland, she made the Side Show Series, drawing the performers of the visiting Hagenbeck and Wallace Circus. Beyond the empathy shown for these extraordinary subjects, such as The Blue Man, Bryson used an exceptional two- or three-color lithographic method. The remarkably luminous purples and blue/greens are alone or overlapped, and the color of the paper is used to its best advantage. The figures are rarely outlined, but silhouetted against densely drawn areas. Lines and shading create mass; scratching out and delicate details result in diverse textures and patterns.
In 1929/31 Bryson was editor of the Columbus Southside Advocate, and in 1931 was an instructor in etching and lithography at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts School. The prints of Depression-related images such as Unemployed Madonna, 1929, are from this period.
Bryson visited New York in 1933 to interview the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the Ohio State Journal. Rivera was making a mural (now destroyed) for Rockefeller Center, and one of his assistants was the artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969). Shahn (Bryson"s future husband), had been hired on the strength of the exhibition of his Sacco and Vanzetti series of 1931/32.
In 1934 Bryson moved to New York. She made lithographs on the Graphics Division of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). At this time she was a founding member, president, and spokeswoman of the Unemployed Artists Association, later the Artists" Union. With Shahn and the modernist artist Stuart Davis, she was an editor of the newspaper, Art Front. The couple"s son, the sculptor Jonathan Shahn, recalled a conversation with the artist Raphael Soyer in the 1970s: Soyer expressed continued amazement at Bryson"s ability to captivate a crowd of thousands at a Union Square rally.
In the mid-1930s Bryson and Shahn moved to Washington, DC, where they worked for the Resettlement Administration* documenting farms and rural areas. (Bryson did all the driving on three extended trips.) Shahn was a photographer, and Bryson made drawings and prints in the lithography shop she established. Her series, The Vanishing American Frontier, 1935/36, is a result of this project.
It is in this period that Jersey Homesteads was developed. The New Jersey, New Deal town now known as Roosevelt, had as its goal the relocation of garment workers from New York tenements. In 1936/37, Ben Shahn, with the assistance of Bryson and others, made a forty-five foot fresco mural in the public school.* Later, in 1939, when houses were offered to a wider public, Bryson and Shahn themselves moved to Roosevelt. Also in this 1938/39 period Bryson and Shahn worked together on the Bronx Post Office Murals, in the Bronx Central Annex. Although the commission was originally awarded to them jointly, Bryson deferred to Shahn in its final execution.
Over several decades, beginning in the 1940s, and into the 1970s, Bryson made illustrations for magazines such as Fortune, Harper"s, and the Scientific American. In the mid 1950s she started illustrating books such as The White Falcon, 1955, and Wuthering Heights, 1963. In the 1950s she began to write and illustrate her own books: The Twenty Miracles of Saint Nicolas, published in 1960, The Zoo of Zeus, 1964 (#20), and Gilgamesh, 1967 (#21). Following the death of her husband in 1969, she wrote the monograph, Ben Shahn, published in 1973.
In the 1960s Bryson and Shahn formed an association with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, and often spent summers there. After Shahn"s death Bryson returned to painting. She produced a body of work with mannequins shown in desolate isolation, or hooded figures in wooded landscapes inspired by New Jersey or Maine forests. Other works from the period have an even clearer surrealist message: eggs balance on hills, caryatids people the streets. In both paintings and works on paper she explored the Goddess of Malta theme in the 1980s.
Bryson was on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was a recipient of the Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts Award from the Women"s Caucus for Art, 1989, and of an honorary doctorate from Ohio University, Athens.
Early work by Bryson was included in Prints by Women, A Survey of Graphic Work by American Women Born Before World War II, Associated American Artists, NY, 1986; Land of the Free, Middle Township Performing Arts Gallery, Cape May Courthouse, New Jersey, 1992; Visions of a Changing America, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY, February/April, 1998; and People at Work, Susan Teller Gallery, NY, September/October, 2002.
Bryson had a one-woman show of recent paintings at Midtown Galleries, NY, 1983. A retrospective of her work was held at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 1987, and prints and drawings made for the Resettlement Administration formed a traveling exhibition that began at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, in 1995, at the time of the publication of the Jake Wein monograph on Bryson, The Vanishing American Frontier.
Her work was shown at the Ben Shahn Gallery, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, February/March, 2002, and at the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, September, 2002. The exhibition, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Seventy-Five Years of Works on Paper: 1928 to 2003, was held at the Susan Teller Gallery, March 7 through April 5, 2003, in honor of the artist"s 100 birthday. She died in 2004.
Work by Bernarda Bryson Shahn is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the University of Louisville Art Collection, Kentucky; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, the University of Nebraska; the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; the Maier Museum of Art, Randolph-Macon Women"s College, Lynchburg, Virginia; and the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey. An archive of work from the Vanishing American Frontier series is in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
*The staff was part of the Special Skills Division. The Resettlement Administration was funded by the Works Progress Administration and assisted by the Department of Agriculture. In 1937 the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) became part of the Department of Agriculture.
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