Listening Across Time

    Judith Shahn, Self Portrait, 1947, Oil on Canvas. At Cove Gallery.   Benji Weinryb Grohsgal, who I got to know some when he was a resident artist at Provincetown Commons, died last week at 37. Reminiscing with Phil Jimenez, he told me that when he’d visited Benji last fall, early in Benji’s cancer treatments, he was concerned with being remembered. I get that. It feels like a very human response in the face of the unknown: will what’s come before continue to matter?         Benji Weinryb Grohsgal and Gaston Lacombe at Benji’s opening at Provincetown Commons, 14 June 2024. Photo courtesy of Provincetown Commons.   We recently hosted a show of Benji’s work at Provincetown Commons, the opening of which was almost exactly a month before he died. It was evident at the opening that being in Provincetown took a lot of energy. Still, I suspect it was important to him to be there, and I know his presence will have lasting resonance in our community. Benji is definitely in our mind’s eye, and in our active memory, but I don’t know if that’s what he meant by ‘being remembered.’ How do we remember people after they die? And how, in particular, might we remember artists — who, perhaps unusually, leave a trail of breadcrumbs through their work? And who gets to tell their story? Those questions came into sharper focus last week when I was fortunate enough to participate in a photographic documentation of the studio estate of Judith Shahn.    A week ago I met Lisa Mecham, who is researching and writing about the life of Judith Shahn. Lisa invited me into conversation with her work by asking to join her as she documented the archive of Judith’s paintings. Judy, as I came to think of her as we went deeper and deeper into her archive, was a painter based in Greenwich Village and Truro. She was born in Paris to Tille Goldstein and her husband, the artist Ben Shahn. Her work spans the 1940s to her death in 2009, and refers to many of the artistic movements of that period (while remaining distinctly hers). Early oil paintings reflect the social realism of the Ashcan School and works in the 1960s bring some of the Pop Art’s focus on the everyday object into a distinct focus. Her later work, it’s mostly the silkscreens I’m thinking of here, bring to attention in elegantly straightforward compositions the beauty of common objects and passing glances.   The word, quotidian, in the sense of ‘the everyday,’ kept rolling off my lips as we looked at Judy’s work. Judy’s work is grounded in her life, in what she sees — signs on the street, people in her neighborhood, people she loves, city construction, working fishermen, the objects in her kitchen. And seemingly every woman in her paintings evokes something of her life — even when the women are clearly not her. They look from their place, clothing, situation toward something bright, through something radiant. And in the paintings that are more clearly self portraits, it’s evident she’s looking from an intense, dispirited interior toward aspired hope.        ^{Judith Shahn, Portrait of Jonathan Shahn, oil on Linen, 1959/1996. At Cove Gallery.}   It’s perhaps inevitable that Judy’s legacy will forever be overshadowed by the enormity of her father’s life as an artist and public intellectual. And it’s perhaps his shadow, as a father who abandoned her in childhood, from which her self portraits are emerging. Having spent a fair amount of time looking at her work this week, and thinking about her life, I’ve come to understand that her aspiration to be in the brightness of life is not so different from Benji’s aspiration to be remembered. We need to be witnessed, and we need to believe that our existence matters.    Artists ask us to look at things they consider to be important and, perhaps more importantly, to pause to consider those things in relation to our own experience. Every artwork is an invitation toward relationship — in the present and over time. In the third stanza of his poem, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman talks to an imagined future:   It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,    I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,    Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,    Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,    Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,    This is a conceit — not of pride but of effect — that many artists share. We want to talk to the future, to travel further than mortality will allow. But that means, in the present, in the now, we — you and I — must pause to listen. I’m trying to do that. Judy and Benji have much to share.    …       Lisa Mecham and me at opening of Shahn Family Show at Cove Gallery, 20 July 2024.   Lisa has been working with the wonderful people at Cove Gallery in Wellfleet — who represent Judith’s estate — to create a show of the Shahn Family’s work. In addition to Judith’s extraordinary work, the show includes Abbe, Jonathan and Ben’s work. The show opened on 20 July 2024. Cove Gallery is at 15 Commercial St, Wellfleet MA.   Gaston Lacombe hosting a memorial show of Benji’s work at Studio Lacombe. The opening of which will be 3 August 2024. Studio Lacombe is at 237 Commercial St., Whalers Wharf, Provincetown MA.