black
grey
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

Ben Shahn

Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.
BEN SHAHN

Call Cried Deliberately Documentary Suppose
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.
BEN SHAHN

Editing Incredible Negative Numbers Stop
When you talk about war on poverty it doesn’t mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.
BEN SHAHN

Mean People War
I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
BEN SHAHN

Found Photography Sketching
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.
BEN SHAHN

Art Enlightenment May Substitute
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.
BEN SHAHN

Journey Moving Self
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
BEN SHAHN

Art Hate Men Revelation
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
BEN SHAHN

Abstract Essence Matter
Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
BEN SHAHN

Blood Reputation War
Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
BEN SHAHN

Knowledge Limited Photography
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.
BEN SHAHN

Art Philosophy Rights
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.
BEN SHAHN

Artist Peculiar Style
I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHN

Artist Differences Sunday
Form is the shape of content.
BEN SHAHN

Content Form Shapes
The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time.
BEN SHAHN

Desire Pregnancy United States
How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
BEN SHAHN

Black Sky Yellow

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

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