One of the most important Social Realist artists of the 1930s and 40s, Ben Shahn was born

in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States at the age of eight. His family settled in

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they lived in a succession of row houses on Walton Street.

Shahn’s impoverished childhood informed the social commentary of his paintings, which

illuminate the oppression and injustices suffered by working class, minority and immigrant

families during the Depression. Shahn said of the inspiration for his work, “At some point very

early in my life I became absorbed—not in Man’s Fate, but rather in Man’s State. The question of

suffering is an eternal mystery wearing many masks and disguises as well as its true face, but its

reality impinges upon us everywhere. I am sure that to some of us it is a more deeply felt and

personal burden than to others. Perhaps I am trying primitively to exorcise it by painting it;

perhaps I am trying to understand it, perhaps to share it. Whatever my basic promptings and

urges may be, I am aware that the concern, the compassion for suffering—feeling it, formulating it

—has been the constant|intention of my work since I first picked up a paintbrush” (Jean Lipman,

ed., What is American in American Art, New York, 1963, p. 95). In New York, Shahn first trained

as a lithographer and his ability in lithography and graphic design can often be perceived in his

paintings. His preferred medium was egg tempera, a popular medium for many of the social

realists of the time, such as Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Thomas Hart Benton. Shahn was also a graphic artist who designed posters supporting social and political causes for various organizations

and media outlets.



Atlantic City, 1946 was painted at a pivotal moment in Shahn’s career, when his focus began shifting

from the social realism of the 1930’s and wartime propaganda work of the early 1940s toward a more symbolic, lyrical style of painting. At first glance the viewer sees a diving board and a group of

figures swimming, a deceptively light scene, yet the painting is more than a depiction of a resort

town that the title suggests. The work suggests Shahn’s interest in the contradictions of

American Life in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Atlantic City was a place of leisure and

spectacle, embodying the desire for escape and pleasure after years of deprivations. At the same

time, Shahn’s stylized figures, distorted perspectives, and uneasy juxtapositions suggest a

subtle critique, hinting that beneath post-war prosperity lay unresolved tensions and inequities.



In his post-WWII paintings, Shahn turned increasingly to allegory, myth and personal

symbolism. The hard-edged political protest of his Depression-era work gave way to a more

contemplative exploration of human resilience, suffering and hope. Leisure and festivity are

present, but so is a searching quality - an acknowledgment that the world has been irreversibly

altered. Atlantic City, 1946 embodies Ben Shahn’s post-WWII concerns, particularly the

“emptiness and waste” he felt in the war’s aftermath, along with “the littleness of people trying

to live on through the enormity of war.”