Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn‘s Liberation is a French maypole scene. I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but if it’s a maypole it must surely be celebrating the end of the war in May 1945 rather than the liberation of France from June to August 1944. (The French do (did) have maypoles (in September), of course, because they are actually Germans, curse their dark and devious souls.)
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