80 Federal Agents Pouring Wine down a Sewer During Prohibition, Destroying Wine
Egg tempera and gouache on masonite,
16 1/4 X 11 1/4, L1226.3a

81  Parade for Repeal 
Egg tempera and gouache on masonite,
16 1/2 X 31 3/4, L1226.3b

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (known as the Volstead Act) banned the manufacture, distribution, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages in the years between 1920 and 1933, the era of Prohibition. When it quickly became apparent that strict enforcement of such legislated social change would be impossible to achieve, New York City became a prime source of demand for bootleg alcohol. This illegal system mainly supplied the estimated thirty-two thousand speakeasies -double the number of legitimate saloons in the city before 1920. By 1933, recognizing the political and social costs of "the Noble Experiment" and the ineffectiveness of its enforcement, Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment, thereby repealing Prohibition.

Ben Shahn made these studies for a mural intended for the Central Park Casino, which had been designed in 1870 by Calvert Vaux as a Ladies Pavilion but which, by the time of Mayor Jimmy Walker's tenure during the "roaring twenties," evolved into a rendezvous for boisterous cafe society. Using architectural details, public signage, popular slogans, and human drama, Shahn conceived this ultimately unrealized mural as an essay on the folly of Prohibition. The well-meaning ladies of the Women's Christian Temperance Union appear resolute in their mission as they parade "for God, for Home, for Native Land" (plate 76). Their modest attire and dour faces under dowdy hats form a humorous contrast with the images in the other panels: bootleggers wearing imaginative devices for concealing liquor on their bodies to circumvent the law (plate 77); chagrined customers of a closed liquor supplier on Bethune Street (next to Shahn's residence at the time) (plate 78); well-heeled patrons in a speakeasy (plate 79); men under the supervision of a stern law enforcer destroying wine in an

alley behind a closed bootleg outlet (plate 80); and dapper, derby-hatted Mayor Walker, rumored to be part-owner of a number of illegal Greenwich Village bars, leading a parade of flag-waving men seeking repeal (plate 81).

Born in 1898 in Kovno, Lithuania, then a province of czarist Russia, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States in 1906. A highly motivated and accomplished student in many academic areas, Shahn received limited formal training in art. From 1913 to 1917, while attending school at night, he served an apprenticeship in Hessenberg's Lithography Shop at 101 Beekman Street in Manhattan. Subsequently he was able to support himself off and on as a printer until he became established as an artist.

In the early 1930s, with the encouragement and technical advice of Walker Evans, who shared his Bethune Street studio, Shahn began taking photographs all over New York City. Shahn himself viewed his camera work only as a device for gathering ideas for future paintings, but the architectural backgrounds of the Prohibition series studies, derived from his photos, help to anchor figures that might otherwise seem merely caricatures.¹ Just before undertaking these works, Shahn had assisted Diego Rivera (1886 -1957) on the mural the Mexican artist had been commissioned to paint for Rockefeller Center. Rivera's controversial depiction of actual personalities, including the Communist leader Vladimir I. Lenin, and of contemporary events clearly influenced Shahn's approach to the Prohibition series conceived for the Central Park Casino.²

  2  When Rivera refused to remove Lenin's portrait from his mural, he was banned from further work on the project. The building's management, contending that the artist had strayed from his approved sketches, destroyed the mural, causing an international controversy.

  3  Notes from a conversation on November 18, 1992, with Jonathan Kuhn, curator of monuments, New York City Parks Commission, in the Museum Archives.

  4  Shahn's later murals included one in 1937 -1938 for the community center of a federal housing development for garment workers in Roosevelt (formerly Jersey Homesteads), New Jersey; one in 1938 - 1939 in the Bronx Central Annex post office; and one in 1940 -1942 in the Federal Security Building in Washington, D.C.