Ben Shahn Art Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.

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.

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.

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

All art is based on non-conformity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

His every line of writing was art. And yet such art was inseparable from its life content.