If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
BEN SHAHNWhen 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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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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.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
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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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Form is the shape of content.
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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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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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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.
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The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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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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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
BEN SHAHN