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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
Ben Shahn
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Ben Shahn
Age: 70 †
Born: 1898
Born: September 12
Died: 1969
Died: March 14
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Benjamin Shahn
Benjamin Shan
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More quotes by Ben Shahn
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
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
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
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
All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn
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
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
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
The popular eye is not untrained it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
Ben Shahn
How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
Ben Shahn
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
Ben Shahn
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
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
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?
Ben Shahn
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
Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
Ben Shahn
I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
Ben Shahn
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
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.
Ben Shahn
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
