Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Between 1931 and 1932, painter Ben Shahn (1898-1969) created a series of twenty-three gouaches and temperas on the infamous trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in 1920 for the murder of a guard during a robbery of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The two men were Italian immigrants as well as committed anarchists. Their radicalism and their ethnicity, far more than the ambiguous evidence in the case, became the basis for the prosecution against them. In 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.