Ben Shahn Quotes

• I’ve been asked a great deal about the influence I’ve had with my work and it’s impossible to say, you know.

  Ben Shahn

  Topics in Influence

• So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it’s all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.

  Ben Shahn

  Topics in Job

  Tags in Offered

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Ago

• The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time.

  Ben Shahn

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Desire

• When a man returned from the field and we’d look at the work, we’d criticize each other very genuinely and never offensively. And we would avoid all tricks, angle shots were just horrible to us.

  Ben Shahn

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Man, Field

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in War, Poverty

• Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.

  Ben Shahn

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Realized

• Whatever I get involved in, I’m totally involved, you see.

  Ben Shahn

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Involved

Ben Shahn (28)

Birth:	12th September, 1898
Death:	14th March, 1969
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Painter, Photographer

About

Ben Shahn was 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. In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, who had fled Siberia. They settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, where two more siblings were born. Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he went on to pursue art at City College in 1921 and then at the National Academy of Design. He also worked for these agencies as a graphic artist and painter.

Related Authors

• George Catlin
• Gustav Klimt
• George Grosz
• Jacques Louis David
• Alan Vega
• Eugène Delacroix
• Ralph Ransom
• Maurice Sendak
• Berthe Morisot
• Hugo Maurice Julien Claus

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 23rd April

Births

• 1940 - Willie Herenton
• 1939 - Lee Majors
• 1858 - Max Planck
• 1942 - Barry Hannah
• 1908 - Abram Fischer

Deaths

• 1971 - Cyril Falls
• 1915 - Rupert Brooke
• 1905 - Joseph Jefferson
• 1988 - Michael Ramsey
• 1986 - Otto Preminger