The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (443 page)

(from Italian
fumo
: smoke). Term used to describe the blending of tones or colours so subtly that they melt into one another without perceptible transitions—in
Leonardo's
words, ‘without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke’. Leonardo was a supreme exponent of
sfumato
and
Vasari
regarded the capacity to mellow the precise outlines characteristic of the earlier
quattrocento
as one of the distinguishing marks of ‘modern’ painting.

 
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(1898–1969).
American painter, illustrator, photographer, designer, teacher, and writer, born at Kovno, Lithuania, then part of Russia. His family emigrated to the USA in 1906 and settled in New York. Shahn's background (his father had been sent to Siberia for revolutionary activities and he grew up in a Brooklyn slum) gave him a hatred of cruelty and social injustice, which he expressed powerfully in his work. He first made a name with a series of pictures (1931–2) on the Sacco and Vanzetti case (these two Italian immigrants had been executed for murder in 1927 on very dubious evidence, and many liberals believed that they had really been condemned for their anarchist political views). Shahn's paintings are in a deliberately awkward, caricature-like style that vividly expresses his anger and compassion. In 1933 he was assistant to Diego
Rivera
on the latter's murals for the Rockefeller Center, New York, and subsequently he painted a number of murals himself, notably for the Bronx Post Office, New York (1938–9), and the Social Security Building, Washington (1940–1). From 1935 to 1938 he worked as an artist and photographer for the Farm Security Administration, a government agency that documented rural poverty. During the Second World War his work included designing posters for the Office of War Information. After the war he returned to easel painting and was also active as a book and magazine illustrator and as a designer of mosaics and stained glass. His later work tended to be more fanciful and reflective and less concerned with social issues. From the 1950s he gave more time to teaching and lecturing and in 1956–7 he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. His lectures there were published as
The Shape of Content
(1957), in which he summarized his humanistic, anti-abstract artistic philosophy.

 
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See
RICKETTS
.

 
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shaped canvas
.

A term that began to be used in the 1960s for paintings on
supports
that departed from the traditional rectangular format. Non-rectangular pictures were of course not new at this time;
Gothic
and
Renaissance
altarpieces often had irregular pointed tops, the oval was particularly popular in the
Baroque
and
Rococo
periods, and so on. The phrase ‘shaped canvas’, however, usually alludes particularly to a type of abstract painting that emphasizes the ‘objecthood’ of the work, proclaiming it as something that exists entirely in its own right and not as a reference to, or reproduction of, something else. Various artists have been claimed as the ‘inventor’ of the shaped canvas in this sense, but its most prominent exponent has undoubtedly been Frank
Stella
, who has used such shapes as Vs, lozenges, and fragments of circles. The leading British exponent has been Richard Smith (1931– ), who has sometimes used a kite-shaped format in which the canvas is stretched on rods that are part of the visual structure of the picture. He was one of the artists represented in an exhibition entitled ‘The Shaped Canvas’, organized by Lawrence
Alloway
at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1974. The shaped canvas has also occasionally been used by modern figurative painters, for example Anthony
Green
.

 
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See
HERMITAGE
.

 
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