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.
BEN SHAHNPersonal 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.
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The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
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Form is the shape of content.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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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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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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.
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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.
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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.
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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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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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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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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.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that’s the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary.
BEN SHAHN