I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
BEN SHAHNThe moving toward one’s inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn’t understand at the time.
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The moving toward one’s inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.
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Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.
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Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
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What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?
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Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.
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I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
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I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
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The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
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Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto… has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.
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I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
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It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
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An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.
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The apprehension of… values is intuitive; but it is not a built-in intuition, not something with which one is born. Intuition in art is actually the result of… prolonged tuition.
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Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
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The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
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It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.
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Content may by trivial. But I do not think that any person may pronounce either upon the weight or upon the triviality of an idea before its execution.
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All art is based on nonconformity … Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
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Form is the shape of content.
BEN SHAHN