?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
BEN SHAHN Huey Long<>.
Gouache on cream wove paper, 1935. 312x241 mm; 12¼x9½ inches. Signed in ink, lower right, and inscribed "Boring in Life, Boring in Death" lower center. Ex-collection the artist and Kennedy Galleries, New York, with the labels on the frame back.
Exhibited "Ben Shahn: A Retrospective," Jewish Museum, New York, October 18, 1976-February 2, 1977, catalogue number 24.
Governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, Long was a radical populist who sponsored numerous reforms benefitting the rural poor and trade unions. He was an outspoken enemy of Wall Street and big business concerns. A self-taught lawyer born to a poor family in rural Lousiana, Long was among the most controversial politicians of the era. He called on the federal government to confiscate the wealth of the nation's wealthy citizens, to limit private fortunes to $50 million and annual incomes to $1 million and to guarantee every family in America an annual income of $5000. Long's slogan, unsurprisingly, was "Every Man A King."
