The Shape of Content

5 ideas

1. Allegory grew from a tenement fire

   Shahn traces how his painting 'Allegory,' with its red, lion-like fire beast looming over small figures, grew out of drawings he made to illustrate a magazine account of a Chicago tenement fire that killed a man's four children. As he worked, the specific news event merged with his own childhood terror of fires in his Russian village and with older images of fire as a living beast. He uses this history to show that a finished image is a sediment of commission, memory, symbol, and formal decisions, not a transcription of one idea.

2. Form is the shape of content

   Form is not a container poured around a separately existing meaning. It is the visible configuration that a specific content takes when an artist gives it material existence. Changing the form changes what is said, so a work cannot be judged as pure form or pure message; the two are one act of shaping.

3. Universality reached through the particular

   Shahn describes moving from documentary social scenes toward what he called personal realism. He found that the specific, privately felt image reaches more people than a generalized public statement. An artist gains a shared meaning by rendering one experience with complete particularity and inner conviction, not by aiming at an abstract everyman.

4. Nonconformity as the artist's social function

   Art arises from dissent: the artist sees differently and must refuse the received ways of seeing, or there is nothing new to make. A society's willingness to tolerate and protect its nonconformists measures its health. Pressure for conformity, whether from politicians or from art-world orthodoxies, starves the source of the culture's own renewal.

5. Educate the artist in everything

   Shahn's prescription combines deep craft with deliberately wide exposure. The artist should attend a university and several art schools, read history, philosophy and literature, and draw constantly. They should also work at odd jobs, travel, listen to all conversations, and get embroiled in politics and life. The premise is that content cannot be taught directly, so the artist must accumulate a full, informed, opinionated self for form to give shape to.

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