Ben Shahn famous quotes

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
-- Ben Shahn

#Believe #Artist #Labels

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

#Jobs #Artist #Wife

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.
-- Ben Shahn

#Photography #Eye #Decision

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.
-- Ben Shahn

#Photography #Sketching #Found

It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
-- Ben Shahn

#Teaching #Voice #Personality

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 Shahn

#Art #Enlightenment #May

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

#Shapes #Painting #Affair

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.
-- Ben Shahn

#Skills #Special #Propaganda

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
-- Ben Shahn

#Artist #Conservative #Members

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

#Art #Wall #Pride

Form is the shape of content...
-- Ben Shahn

#Shapes #Form

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

#Art #Intuition #Born

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

#Art #Attitude #Thinking

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
-- Ben Shahn

#Art #Individuality #Imagine

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
-- Ben Shahn

#Men #Artist #Focus

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

#Thinking #Ideas #May

I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
-- Ben Shahn

#Elements #World #Dull

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. 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

#Art #Years #Giving

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

#Photography #Jobs #Wish

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
-- Ben Shahn

#Photography

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
-- Ben Shahn

#War #Blood #Reputation

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
-- Ben Shahn

#Photography #Choices #Mediums

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.
-- Ben Shahn

#Art #Essence #Fundamentals

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

#Pregnancy #Desire #United States

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
-- Ben Shahn

#Sky #Yellow #Black

All art is based on non-conformity.
-- Ben Shahn

#Art #Conformity #Art Is

I 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.
-- Ben Shahn

#People #Sake #Action

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

#War #Mean #People

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

#Art #Men #Today

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. 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 Shahn

#Taken #Ordinary #Done

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.
-- Ben Shahn

#Art #Class #Sculpture

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
-- Ben Shahn

#Believe #Paint #Feels

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; 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

#Art #Numbers #Quality

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.
-- Ben Shahn

#Thinking #Doe #Painting

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

#Artist #Style #Peculiar

The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
-- Ben Shahn

#Art #Hate #Men

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.
-- Ben Shahn

#Moving #Journey #Self

The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
-- Ben Shahn

#Eye #Vision #Visuals