While the trial may have prompted Shahn into a more personal style, his revisitation of the controversy in Portrait of Sacco and Vanzetti was all but ignored as his celebrity obscured the decades-old controversy. Though the men were tried and executed in the mid-1930s,  editorials from the Chicago Daily Tribune indicate that the debate over the legitimacy of the trial lasted for decades: in 1958, when Shahn created the prints, there was a movement in Massachusetts to obtain pardons for the two men. However, this seemed to mark the official end of the public’s interest in the case. By contrast, Shahn’s acclaim as an artist had only increased: when the print was exhibited in 1964, Ben Shahn had already shown at the World’s Fair and numerous other American art retrospectives, and had received the Academy of American Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Graphic art just months before. While numerous articles extolled Shahn as one of the most prominent artists of the century, The Portrait of Sacco and Vanzetti was never mentioned. The subject that had initially propelled him into fame was no longer relevant. However, the serigraphs find significance in that they “marked his transition from a dissatisfied academician to an artist with a unique style”: though the subject matter was no longer noteworthy, the works themselves illustrate Shahn’s evolution as an artist.