A blind scientist manipulates a thorny bush. Two works convey the artist's views about artistic creation. They offer themselves tentatively and without joy. That concentration produces a facial expression nearing agony. In many of Shahn's works, hands are the conveyor of mood and meaning.
Upright clarinets encircle the tortured artist, buried behind clenched and clawing hands.
A solo tin horn, with a clown's face, is both mocking and pained. Artists are driven to create, sometimes as prisoners of their art. Perhaps the tools and forms of their art are desperately limiting. Much of Shahn's work on exhibit from his two final decades make visual reference to the dangers of nuclear holocaust. The work refers to a highly publicized incident in which a Japanese fishing boat, with 23 fishermen on board, strayed within the range of American hydrogen-bomb testing near the Bikini atoll in the Pacific in March 1954.