The Jersey Homesteads Mural: Ben Shahn, Bernarda Bryson, and History Painting in the 1930S”Published in Redefining History Painting, Cambridge University Press, 1995
RESEARCH ESSAY “The Jersey Homesteads Mural: Ben Shahn, Bernarda Bryson, and History Painting in the 1930s”published in Redefining History Painting, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ©Susan Noyes Platt Jersey Homestead Mural, (detail), photograph by Susan Platt In a mural for the community of Jersey Homesteads, (now Roosevelt), New Jersey, Ben Shahn, with the assistance of Bernarda Bryson,1 redefined contemporary history painting by combining the difficult medium of true fresco with unusual historical themes, and a spatial order that dramatizes the psychological aspect of the scenes. Painted during 1937-1938 in a medium which demands rapid work in large simple forms, the mural nonetheless includes three detailed and interrelated historical episodes with many subordinate scenes and references. The primary themes are Jewish immigration, Union organizing, and the planning of a cooperative community in the early New Deal Resettlement Administration. Spatially, the mural combines the traditional linear perspective of the Renaissance, the shallow space of some photographic portraits, the three dimensionality of theatrical sets, and the arrested action of film frames. These various devices serve to underline the contrasts between the dynamic and the static experiences depicted. 2 In narrating history, the mural departs from the tradition of the unified tableau, based in the theory of Diderot, which focuses on a single moment in which the action hangs in the balance, the peripateia. In the traditional tableau there is frequently a single identifiable heroic figure who with gesture and pose, implies the leadership of the moment in history depicted. This concept of history descends into still photography as the "decisive moment." Instead of the peripateia, the mural created in Jersey Homesteads, New Jersey presents groups of figures acting as part of an on-going process.
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