Atomic Tables

According to the Stephen Lee Taller Ben Shahn Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, the mosaic mural for which this is a study is permanently installed in the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Originally commissioned by the Zim Israel Navigation Company in Israel for the ship, S.S. Shalom, this work points to Shahn's interest in the work of Paul Klee and to Shahn's contemporaries of abstract expressionism in New York. In this work, Shahn "depicts a colorful geometric patchwork with curvilinear lines and dots moving freely through the graph created by color blocks. Along the top and bottom edges is a commentary on the nature of true philosophy by the seventeenth-century physicist Robert Hooke, stressing the need to maintain the links between the hands, the eyes, memory and reason. If one element is weak or loose, 'the whole chain is in danger of being dissolved.' Philosophical insight and historical memory, therefore, must guide the hands of the atomic scientist." (F.K. Pohl, Ben Shahn, San Francisco, California, 1993, p. 29)