A complete set of Ben Shahn’s series of portraits of Frederick Douglass. The group not only coincided with the centenary of the end of the Civil War, and was a celebration of the most famous Black American of the nineteenth-century, but was also a comment on the civil rights movement in the United States.
Ben Shahn frequently collaborated with and contributed to projects involving Black life in America as well as South Africa. including winning an award for the design of a medal of Martin Luther King Jr., several portraits of the same, and works both sombre and hopeful, such as the print I Think Continually of Those who were Truly Great (1965). “In the mid-1860s, Shahn focused on the civil rights struggle in a characteristically personal way. He completed four drawings of Frederick Douglass … The artist gave permission to the Museum of African Art in Washington to reproduce and sell a portfolio of these drawings to benefit the museum’s Frederick Douglass Institution of Negro Arts and History. He personally signed and numbered each photo-silkscreen print” (Conrad).
Conrad, D.R., “Ben Shahn as Aesthetic Educator” in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April, 1981), p.79; Heyd, M., Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art (Rutgers, 1999); McNulty, Collected Prints of Ben Shahn, 71; Prescott, 97, 98, 99 and 100.
