Ben Shahn Quotes

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.