AS he started to paint this week's cover portrait of Sargent Shriver, chief of the anti-poverty campaign, Artist Ben Shahn recollected his own fairly close acquaintance with the condition of the poor. "I grew up with it," he says, "and then had another dose during the Depression."
Lithuania-born, Brooklyn-bred, the young immigrant was raised in a Williamsburg slum. Later Shahn attended art schools in the U.S. and Europe, and over the years evolved his own distinctive style, winning fame as a painter of biting social comment, somewhere between caricature and fantasy. His work has taken many forms. During World War II, he...
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