Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahnwas a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content...
NationalityLithuanian
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth12 September 1898
CountryLithuania
arranged art exhibition impressed involved picked work
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.
felt outfit time
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.
asked deal great impossible work
I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.
hard written
It's pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.
efforts felt social strongly trying
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.
amateur enable himself outside supports whose works
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.
art philosophy rights
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.
art hate men
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
artist style peculiar
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.
art numbers quality
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.
believe paint feels
Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
art class sculpture
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.
eye vision representation
The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
art men today
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.