Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969
"American Gothic" (Rehabilitation Clients, Boone County, Arkansas)
ferrotyped gelatin silver print, typed caption label, Resettlement Administration credit and Time, Inc. file stamps, credit, extensive annotations, and 'RA6034M2' in pencil and blue china marker on the reverse
image: 7¾ by 9⅞ in. (19.7 by 25.1 cm.)
Executed in 1935.
Please note that this lot will not be on view during the sale exhibition. It is located at our Long Island City, New York storage facility. If you would like to examine it in person before the sale please contact Anjli Patel at [email protected]
Condition Report
Literature
Margaret R. Weiss, ed., Ben Shahn, Photographer: An Album from the Thirties (New York, 1973), cover and pl. 45
Archibald MacLeish and Davis Pratt, The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn (Cambridge, 1975), p. 64
Catalogue Note
A typed label is affixed to the reverse with the following caption: "'American Gothic' Arkansas farmer and his wife who have been aided by the Resettlement Administration. After being on the relief rolls some time this man was given a small loan by the Resettlement Administration and aided in managing his farm. He is now on the road to economic sufficiency."
From 1935 to 1938, Ben Shahn worked for the Farm Security Administration, photographing the widespread destitution caused by the Great Depression. He traveled the American South documenting what President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to in his second inaugural address as ". . . one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Prints of this image are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Ben Shahn Archive at the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge.