I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
BEN SHAHNWhat 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?
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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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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.
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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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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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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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It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.
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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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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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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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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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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It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.
BEN SHAHN