Quotes by Ben Shahn

“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.”

“The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti”

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

“Self Portrait among the Churchgoers, 1939,”

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

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.

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.