Hunger by Ben Shahn 1946

Ben Shahn’s Hunger was completed in 1946, one year after the conclusion of World War II. This work constitutes conceptual art because it responds to the horrors of the war. It features a little boy with darkened facial features, hollowed eyes, and noticeably protruding neck tendons. The tempera paint used allows Shahn to clearly distinguish these features through the lighting. Shahn uses uniform colors in the rest of the painting, which allows the viewers to solely focus on the boy’s face. His face alone gives off feelings of sadness, longing, and desperation–key characteristics of those experiencing the war. Shahn once considered Hunger to be too abstract, but he later realized that it accurately depicted the “sense of emptiness and waste that the war gave me.” It would, therefore, be more accurate to call it a mimesis because it imitates a starving child and suggests a specific interpretation. 

Shahn was a political leftist, and as a result, conservative Congress members vehemently opposed the US State Department’s purchasing of Hunger in 1946. They believed that Shahn was trying to depict Americans as “despondent, broken-down, or of hideous shape…” Hunger, however,  doesn’t explicitly lean towards any particular end of the political spectrum, instead expressing the universal dissatisfaction towards the war. Hunger also covers a broad theme: the impact of the war on those who lived through or still feel the effects of it. Its goal is to be unpleasant to look at and evoke a feeling of pity or sadness from the viewer. Taken into context, it tries to convince the viewer that the cause of these feelings, World War II, should never be repeated in history.

The clever dark shading in Hunger gives a sense of desperation and hopelessness. Because it touches on the negative emotions surrounding the war, Hunger is effective in creating some meaningful opposition towards it. While patriotism and purpose may sometimes make us feel obligated to fight in a war, it’s important to realize that it also brings the worst of humanity, and Shahn highlights this very effectively. The color scheme that he uses is relatively simple so as to not overwhelm the viewer with details, but the one portion of the painting that it does emphasize elicits a powerful response from the viewer. It’s easy to throw your support for something that you are not directly involved in, but once you experience it firsthand or gain the perspective of someone else’s experience, it becomes much more difficult.