The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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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Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
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A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward.
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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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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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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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.
BEN SHAHN -
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.
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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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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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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
BEN SHAHN