Bernarda Shahn, 101; Author, Artist Known in Recent Decades for Painting

Bernarda Bryson Shahn, a painter and illustrator who also worked with her artist husband, Ben Shahn, on one of his most important public murals of the 1930s, has died. She was 101.

Shahn died Sunday at home in Roosevelt, N.J., of natural causes, according to her son, Jonathan.

In her 90s, Shahn was honored with a retrospective exhibit in 2002 at the Ben Shahn Galleries of William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. Her last show, at the Susan Teller Gallery in New York City, coincided with her 100th birthday in April 2003.

Shahn’s Social Realist style is associated with such prominent 1930s artists as Moses Soyer and Raphael Soyer as well as Ben Shahn. But she made the style her own, working as a lithographer and illustrator before she turned to painting.

“Bernarda always had a social or political message in her art,” said Nancy Einreinhofer, who curated the Paterson University exhibit. “Early in her career, she was very innovative as a printmaker and illustrator, but she was not like most popular illustrators of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Her work was somewhat abstract.”

Later in life, she changed her style. In one recent painting, an enormous egg floats above the ruins of an ancient city.

Others show a mannequin come to life or a hooded figure walking in a forest.

“Bernarda turned Realism to Surrealism,” Mel Leipzig, an artist and longtime friend of Shahn, said Friday. He described her as a private person, fiercely independent and much more interested in the present than the past.

An author as well as an artist, Shahn wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books, including “The Twenty Miracles of St. Nicolas” (1960), “The Zoo of Zeus” (1964) and “Gilgamesh, Man’s First Story” (1967). She also illustrated editions of Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Other books include “Ben Shahn” (1972), a monograph about her husband, and “The Vanishing American Frontier” (1995), a book of lithographs she made on a cross-country trip in the 1930s.

Born in Athens, Ohio, the daughter of newspaper editor and publisher Charles Harvey Bryson, who owned the Athens Morning Journal, she studied art at Ohio University in Athens and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Then she became the art critic for the Ohio State Journal in Columbus.

On assignment in New York City in 1933, she interviewed Mexican artist Diego Rivera, who was painting a mural in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. There she met Rivera’s assistant, Ben Shahn.

She and Shahn became a couple and had three children, but did not marry until shortly before his death in 1969.

She is survived by a son, a daughter, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, the couple lived in New York City but spent several brief periods in Washington, D.C. She worked as an illustrator for Fortune, Harpers and Scientific American magazines. She also was a graphic artist for the federal Work Projects Administration and organized a lithography studio for the Resettlement Administration, two government-sponsored public works programs that employed artists.

In 1938, she assisted Ben Shahn on a major commission, a mural for the lobby of the Bronx General Post Office. Titled “America at Work,” it shows laborers in cotton fields, textile mills and steel plants, along with a verse from Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing,” which was the inspiration for the painting.

In 1939, the Shahns moved to Roosevelt, N.J., a town created by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Work Projects Administration community originally intended for garment workers. Ben Shahn discovered the place in 1936 when he was hired to paint a mural for the local elementary school.

As a widow in her 60s, Bernarda Shahn turned all of her attention to painting. At 98, still vigorous, she worked every day and agreed to let Leipzig paint her.

His “Portrait of the Artist Bernarda Bryson Shahn in Her Studio” shows her relaxed in a comfortable chair, surrounded by her works in progress.