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Quote by Ben Shahn

“I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.”

Quote by Ben Shahn

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Author

Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn was an American artist known for his social realism style and woodcuts. His works often focused on the lives of the working class and ordinary people, reflecting the social and political conditions of the United States in the 20th century. more

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“The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.”

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Author:Ben Shahn
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“When the thing observed... is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning and the whole becomes unrecognizable. This is often true of snapshots in which no pattern of salient shapes organizes the mass of vague and complex nuances.”

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Book:Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
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