Vatican Museums

This painting belongs to the final series of drawings and paintings by Ben Shahn, “The Saga of the Lucky Dragon”, which he produced between 1960 and 1962 in protest against the American nuclear experiments in the Pacific Ocean. In particular, the works criticise an accident in March 1954 that involved the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, engulfed by a radioactive cloud near the Bikini Atoll.
Shahn condenses the narration of this tragic event in a few visual elements that draw the gaze of the observer alternately to the upper part of the painting, where the toxic clouds are concentrated, and the lower part, invaded by a multitude of hands that obsessively reproduce the farewell gesture of the title.