From That Day On

The leading chronicler of social and political injustice in mid-century American painting, Ben Shahn was a persuasive artist whose bold works convey enormous compassion for human suffering. From That Day On belongs to the Lucky Dragon series of paintings that Shahn created to commemorate the deaths of the crew of the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat caught in the radioactive cloud of a 1954 U.S. hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific. Shahn, who believed he could best illuminate universal tragedy by focusing on specifics, here has honored the fisherman Aikichi Kuboyama, who died seven months after the bomb blast. Kuboyama’s burned and darkened flesh is juxtaposed with the tender new skin of his baby daughter. This shocking contrast, along with the representation of living plants in the decorative textile patterns, denotes the cycles of birth and death. Kuboyama’s enormous, grievously wounded hands underscore his innocence and helplessness. A dragon emerging from a red cloud at the upper left reminds the viewer of the event itself, the role of fate (the dragon is often a symbol of destiny), and what Shahn called “the ineffable, unspeakable tragedy” of atomic power, whose threat to civilization weighed heavily on his thoughts in the last years of his life.