Bernarda Bryson Shahn Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1903 - d. 2004

Bernarda Bryson Shahn (March 7, 1903 – December 13, 2004) was an American painter and lithographer. She also wrote and illustrated children's books including The Zoo of Zeus and Gilgamesh. The renowned artist Ben Shahn was her "life companion" and they married in 1969, shortly before his death.

Bernarda Bryson was born in Athens, Ohio, where her father owned the Athens Morning Journal and her mother was a Latin professor. Both of her parents were politically active and liberal. In Ohio she studied art, including etching, and art history at several schools including Ohio University, Ohio State University, and the Cleveland School of Art, and learned lithography from a friend. She married young, divorced, and then worked for a newspaper in Columbus, the Ohio State Journal, writing about art news, and teaching printmaking for the museum school at the Columbus Museum of Art. On a trip to New York in 1932 (or 1933) to interview Diego Rivera, during the production of his Rockefeller Center murals, she met his assistant Ben Shahn. After moving to New York shortly after completing the interview, Bryson reconnected with Shahn and they moved to Washington, DC. Bryson and Shahn had three children together and eventually settled in Roosevelt, New Jersey. She died at her home in Roosevelt at the age of 101 on December 13, 2004.