Ben Shahn Called This "The Best Work I've Done." It Could Be Rubble Next Year.
This is an actual scoop: The federal government is racing to sell off a building that contains priceless New Deal murals. Save the Cohen!
Details from “The Meaning of Social Security” by Ben Shahn (1942) in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, Washington, D.C. Photos for the General Services administration by Carol M. Highsmith.
Last week I tried, unsuccessfully, to go see some frescoes that my grandfather (yours, too, or maybe great-grandfather) paid Ben Shahn to paint back in the early 1940s. They’re situated inside the building on Capitol Hill that houses the Voice of America, just across Independence Avenue from the National Museum of the American Indian. I was denied admittance because the building is being vacated in anticipation of its being sold off.
We’ve heard a lot about the Trump administration’s insane efforts to eliminate the Voice of America. That’s an important story. But another important story, one that nobody’s told before, is that a year from now the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building could be demolished by a private developer, along with not only the Shahn frescoes, which Shahn once called “the best work I’ve done,” but also a Philip Guston mural whose existence is unknown even to most Voice of America employees because it’s hidden behind a blue curtain in the building’s auditorium. Two blocks to the north, the National Gallery of Art hosted a major Guston retrospective in 2023.
The Shahns are pictured above. Here’s the Guston:
Details from “Reconstruction and the Wellbeing of the Family” in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building. Photos for the General Services Administration by Carol Highsmith and David L. Olin.
Trump isn’t solely to blame for this fiasco—President Joe Biden signed the bill directing GSA to sell the Cohen building shortly before leaving office, and the insanity of the federal budgeting process kept the building from being maintained properly over the past eight decades, to the point where VOA pretty much had to vacate it. But Trump of course has a history of promising to preserve art only to destroy it, just to be a dick, and it’s doubtful that works of art specifically celebrating the glories of social welfare legislation would thrill him even if he knew of their existence (which probably he doesn’t).
The first part of my Save the Cohen! story is up on the New Republic; a second installment is on the way. You can read it here. Please do, and please circulate it on social media if that’s something you ever do.