The New York Times
September 14, 2001
By Ken Johnson

While spectacular new cultural cathedrals like the Guggenheim Bilbao 
or the Tate Modern attract big money and worldwide attention, small 
museums in small cities and towns all across America are barely 
surviving, if not slowly dying.

They may be blessed -- or burdened -- with troves of artworks by
once-semifamous, now-forgotten names and tons of decorative objects, 
artifacts and memorabilia donated by local citizens, but they usually 
have little space to display their treasures and limited resources for 
preservation and proper storage. Then, every so often, one of these 
beleaguered institutions gets lucky.

   A case in point is the Jersey City Museum, which has lately been 
rescued from oblivion on the top floor of the Jersey City Public Library, 
where it was quartered since its founding in 1901. The museum is about 
to open to the public in its new home, in a former Post Office warehouse 
that underwent a $6.5 million renovation. The opening, originally scheduled 
for yesterday, has been postponed until next week.

The boxy, yellow-brick building is not much to look at from the outside, 
but inside the new facility has all the features of a big-city museum: 
gift shop, cafe, skylight lobby, a 152-seat theater, up-to-date collections 
storage and nicely proportioned galleries with white walls, natural wood 
trim and wall-to-wall carpeting.

Charles Gifford of Meyer & Gifford Architects in New York designed the 
new interior. No doubt the born-again museum will be a crown jewel of 
Jersey City culture; whether it will attract attention and support from 
farther away  will depend on the interest of its exhibition program, which 
is off to a respectable start with: "Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco 
and Vanzetti," an exhibition of small paintings, drawings, prints and 
photographs devoted to the one of the ardent leftist's favorite themes...

Organized by Alejandro Anreus, the museum's former curator, the 
Shahn exhibition is as much about history as about art. Nicola Sacco 
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were working-class Italian immigrants and 
anarchists who were arrested in 1920 for a robbery at a shoe factory 
and the murder of a guard and paymaster, in South Braintree, Mass. 
The case became a cause celebre in leftist circles, where it was 
assumed that the prosecution and eventual execution of the pair in
1927 was motivated by reactionary and xenophobic politics.

In 1932, Shahn had a career-defining exhibition of small gouache 
paintings about the case at the Downtown Art Gallery in New York. 
Basing his pictures on photographs from newspapers, Shahn rendered 
the accused, their families, the sentencing judge and other involved 
parties in what would become his signature cartoon style of wobbly 
yet emphatic outlines and subtly modulated planes of color.

Mr. Anreus has gathered together 16 of the 23 original works in the 
series. Gently Expressionistic and without allegorical bombast, Shahn's 
paintings have a surprisingly understated tenderness -- so understated, 
indeed, that they tell little about the particulars of the case or about the 
broader political controversy it engendered. The show includes 
photographs that Shahn worked from and explanatory wall texts, but 
ultimately you need the catalog, with essays by Mr. Anreus and others 
who define the artistic and political contexts and bring it all into 
illuminating perspective....

"Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," opening next week, 
will run through Dec. 16, at the Jersey City Museum, 350 Montgomery 
Street, at Monmouth Street, (201) 413-0303.

GRAPHIC: Photo: Detail from Ben Shahn's "Passion of Sacco and 
Vanzetti," in the Jersey City Museum's new building. (Estate of Ben 
Shahn/VAGA, New York)

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