Top 15 Ben Shahn Quotes

There are, roughly, about three conditions that seem to be basic in the artist's equipment: to be cultured, to be educated, and to be integrated.

I think that one of the great virtues of the university lies in its being a community in the fullest sense of the word, a place of residence, and at the same time one of personal affirmation and intellectual rapport.

It [art] communicates directly without asking approval of any authority. Its values are not those of set virtues, but are of the essential nature of man, good or bad. Art is one of the few media of expression which still remains unedited, unprocessed, and undictated. If its hazards are great, so are its potentialities magnificent.

freedom itself is a disciplined thing. Craft is that discipline which frees the spirit; and style is the result.

I believe that there is no kind of experience which has not its potential visual dimension or its latent meanings for literary or other expression. Know all you can mathematics, physics, economies, and particularly history. As part of the whole education, the teaching of the university is therefore of profoundest value.

One's education naturally begins at the cradle. But it may perfectly well begin at a later time too. Be born poor... or be born rich... it really doesn't matter. Art is only amplified by such diversity.

What is it about us, the public, and 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 is always in the future that the course of art lies

Today's conformity is, more than anything else, the retreat from controversiality. Tomorrow's art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today's forbidden territory.

Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere, a failure of hope or belief or rebellion.

Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the pre-condition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present-and tolerated-in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.

I have always held a notion of a healthy society as one in which the two opposing elements, the conservative and the creative (or radical, or visionary, or whatever term is best applied to the dissident), exist in a mutual balance. The conservative, with its vested interest in things as they are, holds onto the present, gives stability, and preserves established values (and keeps the banks open). The visionary, always able to see the configuration of the future in present things, presses for change, experiment, the venture into new ways. A truly creative artist is inevitably of this part of the society.

each of them [artists] stands out as an island of civilized feeling in an ocean of corruption. Civilization has freely vindicated them in everything but their nonconformity.

In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of a civilization, of its established values and its tastes-those of the past and even those present ones which have become accepted. Without the conservative we would know little of the circumstances of past art; we would have lost much of its meaning; in fact, we would probably have lost most of the art itself. However greatly the creative artist may chafe at entrenched conservatism, it is still quite true that his own work is both sustained and enriched by it.

The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved.