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.
BEN SHAHNForm is the shape of content.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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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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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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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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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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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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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.
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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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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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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