Ben Shahn Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
Ever since I could remember I'd wished I'd been lucky enough to be alive at that great time—when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly I realized I was. Here I was living through another crucifixion. Here was something to paint!

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
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 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
Fame is like a smudge on your nose. You can't see it. Other people can.

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

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
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