Ben Shahn — Encyclopædia Britannica
Citation
Britannica Editors. “Ben Shahn.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed 2026-05-09. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ben-Shahn
Tier justification
Tier 3: per CREDIBILITY.md Tier 3 list, “Encyclopedia entries with named authors and visible references (Grove Art, Encyclopedia Britannica).” Britannica is editorially reviewed and fact-checked by Britannica Editors per the page’s own attribution, which establishes its Tier-3 credibility but does not promote it above the rubric’s explicit placement. Used here as a Tier-3 corroboration of Shahn’s day-month birth and death tokens, his birthplace, and his FSA period 1935–1938 — the year-level dates and biographical spine remain anchored at Tier 1 via src-icp-ben-shahn-archive.
Key excerpts / pages
Verbatim quotations from the page fetched 2026-05-09:
- Opening line: “Ben Shahn (born September 12, 1898, Kaunas, Russia [now in Lithuania]—died March 14, 1969, New York, New York, U.S.) was an American painter and graphic artist whose work, displaying a combination of realism and abstraction, addressed various social and political causes.”
- “Shahn immigrated with his family to New York City in 1906. In 1913–17 he worked as a lithographer’s apprentice while attending high school at night.”
- “From 1935 to 1938 he worked for the Farm Security Administration as an artist and photographer.”
- “Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Brysen, executed a series of panels for the lobby of the Bronx post office in New York in 1938–39, a project that took the form of a geographic panorama of American life.”
Page metadata: “Also known as: Benjamin Shahn”; subject keywords: “American artist”.
Notes
- Perspective: editorial reference / encyclopedia.
- The Britannica entry confirms the September 12, 1898 / March 14, 1969 day-month tokens that Wikipedia (src-wikipedia-ben-shahn-pointer) also records — both at narrative paragraph level rather than birth/death-only registry. The two-source agreement promotes these tokens above pointer status.
- The page does not mention The Family of Man. The connection is made via the MoMA Master Checklist (src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist, in repo) at the plate level and Wikipedia (src-wikipedia-ben-shahn-pointer) for the Boone County, Arkansas plate-source identification.
- Verified against fetched source on 2026-05-09 via
curl -fsSL https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ben-Shahn(HTTP 200, 76,158 bytes).