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 SHAHNIt 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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Form is the shape of content.
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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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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.
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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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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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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The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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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’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
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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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