Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
BEN SHAHNI was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
BEN SHAHN -
How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
BEN SHAHN -
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?
BEN SHAHN -
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 -
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 -
Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.
BEN SHAHN -
Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
BEN SHAHN -
Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
BEN SHAHN -
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 -
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 -
An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
BEN SHAHN -
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.
BEN SHAHN -
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 -
A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.
BEN SHAHN -
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
BEN SHAHN -
I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHN -
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.
BEN SHAHN -
Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
BEN SHAHN -
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
BEN SHAHN -
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.
BEN SHAHN -
It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.
BEN SHAHN -
I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
BEN SHAHN -
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 -
Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
BEN SHAHN -
It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.
BEN SHAHN -
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.
BEN SHAHN