Ben Shahn Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.

Ben Shahn

#4. 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

#5. In '38, this time I did a job for Mr. Stryker. I went on his payroll at about half the salary I was getting before, to cover what he called Harvest in Ohio.

Ben Shahn

#6. Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

Ben Shahn

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

Ben Shahn

#8. 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

#9. I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.

Ben Shahn

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

Ben Shahn

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

Ben Shahn

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so on.

Ben Shahn

#15. 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

#16. It's pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.

Ben Shahn

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.

Ben Shahn

#22. 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

#23. Form is the shape of content ...

Ben Shahn

#24. I confess that Roy 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

#25. 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

#26. I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

Ben Shahn

#27. 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

#28. When a man returned from the field and we'd look at the work, we'd criticize each other very genuinely and never offensively. And we would avoid all tricks, angle shots were just horrible to us.

Ben Shahn

#29. I still love to look at photographs but I couldn't do it myself anymore.

Ben Shahn

#30. 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

#31. If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.

Ben Shahn

#32. An amateur is someone 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

#33. 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

#34. I didn't care where my works were published.

Ben Shahn

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.

Ben Shahn

#38. I love chaos ... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

Ben Shahn

#39. I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

Ben Shahn

#40. It's a little bit like my inability to read a guide book before I go anywhere. I can read it after I've been there and by the same logic I refuse to accept any technical stunts from anybody. I refused to learn more than I knew and I confess I missed a great deal.

Ben Shahn

#41. It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.

Ben Shahn

#42. Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

Ben Shahn

#43. Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.

Ben Shahn

#44. How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

Ben Shahn

#45. Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

Ben Shahn

#46. Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

Ben Shahn

#47. Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

Ben Shahn

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

Ben Shahn

#51. In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.

Ben Shahn

#52. Whatever I get involved in, I'm totally involved, you see.

Ben Shahn

#53. I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

Ben Shahn

#54. All art is based on non-conformity.

Ben Shahn

#55. 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

#56. I remember traveling around in Arkansas with Senator Robinson, and I told him what this little trick was. He felt very much part of it and had me take pictures of people unbeknownst to them.

Ben Shahn

#57. 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

#58. The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

Ben Shahn