Tennis Court

The present work was commissioned for the August 1948 issue of Seventeen magazine by the publication's director, Cipe Pineles. Of the creation of Tennis Court, Pineles recalled: "I remember the first story he did. It concerned a 14-year-old boy, a keen tennis player, who is ashamed of his mother because she is very pregnant, and he is determined to keep this fact from his friends. To do this he keeps them from using the family tennis court, which up to the time of the pregnancy had been the center of social activity. I gave Ben a two week deadline. He could do anything he pleased, in any shape and any number of colors. There was only one restriction. The hero and his friends must be clearly recognizable as youngsters in their teens. Three days later the finished job came in and it was plenty clear. There was no hero. There were no friends to be seen. Instead, stretching across two pages in a long, thin picture, was the most deserted, clearest, biggest tennis court in a brilliant color, marked with the sharpest, neatest, traditional white lines. It was a breathtaking beautiful shock of a painting to go with that story. It was also a wonderful painting if you had never heard of the story." (C.P. Golden, A Medal for Ben, New York 1958, n.p.)