Roosevelt to swap land with estate of late resident artist

Ben Shahn’s Bauhaus studio slated to hit market shortly

BY JANE MEGGITT Correspondent

A n ordinance concerning the former property of one of Roosevelt’s best-known residents passed unanimously at theApril 9 council meeting. The ordinance authorized the exchange of certain municipal property with adjacent private property.

Councilman Jeff Ellentuck said the artist Ben Shahn built his studio in 1940, but part of it is on public land.

“In order for the heirs to sell the house, they need this [ordinance],” he said .

Councilman Tom Curry said the land in question was adjacent to borough property, joking that the land swap means the town is “getting a little more swampland.”

The ordinance states that the borough owns certain property on the tax map identified as block 3, lot 34, and that the owners of the adjacent property, block 3, lot 29, have offered to convey to the borough approximately 3,847 square feet of land along the southerly border in exchange for conveyance of a 3,847- square-foot portion of land from lot 34.

Borough officials determined that there is no public purpose for retaining that portion of lot 34, and agreed to the exchange, according to the ordinance. They determined that the portion of lot 29 being conveyed to the borough is at least of equal value to the portion of lot 34 to be conveyed by the borough.

The ordinance states that the property being conveyed to the borough is in a “natural and undisturbed state,” and is more advantageous for public use.

Born in Lithuania in 1898, Shahn immigrated to New York with his family at age 6 and died in 1969. His wife, artist Bernarda Bryson Shahn, died in 2004 at the age of 101. According to her obituary in the Examiner, she met Shahn in 1931 while she was interviewing Mexican artist Diego Rivera in New York City for a magazine article. Shahn was working as Rivera’s assistant on a mural.

Eventually Bernarda Bryson and Ben Shahn married, and the creative and adventurous couple drove across the country while Shahn photographed images of the rural South and Midwest for the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration/

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The Shahns settled in Roosevelt — then known as Jersey Homesteads — in 1939. Shahn’s Roosevelt Mural, created in what is now the town’s public school, depicts a stream of immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, coming to America and settling in Roosevelt.

According to a 2010 press release regarding the auction of the Shahns’ personal art collection by the Rago Arts and Auction Center, Lambertville, “Ben Shahn dominated the public consciousness in mid-century and achieved institutional success. He was given his first retrospective at the Museum of ModernArt in New York in 1947. He was selected as one of the ‘World’s Ten Best Artists’by Look magazine in 1948. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1954, along with Willem de Kooning. Today, his work is in the collections of over 60 leading museums in the United States, as well as in many private collections.”

The press release stated that the Shahns’ Bauhaus home in Roosevelt will come to market “shortly.” It describes the home as incorporating two additions designed and built by George Nakashima in 1960 and 1965, including a free-edge bench and many other built-ins. Among its many visitors were Albert Einstein, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Barr, Eleanor Roosevelt and Alexander Calder.