Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
BEN SHAHNAll 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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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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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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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All art is based on non-conformity.
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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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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Form is the shape of content.
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If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
BEN SHAHN