Ben Shahn Quotes

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

Form is the shape of content.

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.

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

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

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

I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

It’s pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.

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.

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

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

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.

I didn’t care where my works were published.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Whatever I get involved in, I’m totally involved, you see.

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.

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.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

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

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.