Samuel Lewis Shane - New York City

New York City

In 1920, Shane moved to New York City, where he studied with John French Sloan at the Art Students League. His classmates, including John Graham, Stuart Davis and Alexander Calder, had important influences on his evolving art. In 1922, the Art Students League featured a Shane line drawing on the cover of their school bulletin. While Sloan’s Ashcan School was focused largely on New York scenes and everyday people, the student's art evolved into abstract expressionism and later the New York School. Shane supported himself doing free lance calligraphy. He painted, sketched and created art in various media.

Shane became involved in left wing political and art circles, at first with Jewish anarchists under the influence of his uncle Bernard. Bernard was editor of the Fraye Arbeter Shtime, or Free Workers’ Voice, the Yiddish anarchist paper for a number of years, and was an important part of the Stelton, New Jersey anarchist community. Shane later became sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the "revolutionary" developments there. In Manhattan he was a member of the John Reed Club, of artists, writers and other creative people sympathetic to the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Pact with Germany in 1939, he rejected Soviet style political ideas. Later, he became very committed to Israel, particularly during the 1967 June war. He remained a steadfast supporter of Israel and even the more conservative Israeli policies and politics.