Quotes by Ben Shahn - Page 2

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 / Artist
Artist
Fall
Lines
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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 / Artist
War
Mean
People
Poverty
War Great Today
Degree
Great Deal
Our People
Percentage
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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 / Artist
Accomplish
Administration
Helping
Impact
People Know Trying
Efforts
Strongly
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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 / Artist
Asia
Details
Sculpture
Years Ago
Time Done People
Time People Details
Began
Camera
Photographs
Hundreds
Monuments
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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 / Artist
Art
Philosophy
Rights
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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 / Artist
Editing
Negative
Ruined
Valuable
Confess
Dictatorial
Hole
Incredibly
Pictures
Punch
Roy
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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 / Artist
New York
Association
College
Impressed
Involved
Arranged
Photographs
Exhibition
Picked
York
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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 / Artist
Book
Inability
Little Bit
Logic
Accept
Anybody
Confess
Deal
Great Deal
Guide
Missed
Refused
Stunts
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I confess that Roy [Stryker] 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 / Artist
Editing
Negative
Numbers
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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 / Artist
Art
Giving
Years
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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 / Artist
Artist
Differences
Sunday
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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 / Artist
Done
Ordinary
Taken
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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 / Artist
Art
Quality
Numbers
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The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.
Ben Shahn / Artist
Art
Believe
Emotional
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Ben Shahn Quotes - Page 2

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