Books by Ben Shahn
The Shape of Content (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
by Ben Shahn
“The clearest, most forceful statement on art by an artist of our time that I have read.” ―Frank Getlein, New Republic
An illustrated guide to artistic creation from one of the twentieth century’s most provocative and expressive painters.
Can art be taught? For the celebrated activist-painter Ben Shahn, the answer was a qualified yes. Any would-be artist can take a few courses and dip their toes in the water. But a true education goes far beyond the classroom.
The Shape of Content, compiled from Shahn’s 1956–1957 Norton Lectures, appeals for artists to break the confines of formal instruction. In wide-ranging reflections on art history, the problems of form, and his own career, Shahn conveys the stubborn determination required to move beyond dilettantism and toward an authentic voice. But he delivers no easy formulas. Critics celebrate artists’ seemingly effortless moments of inspiration, yet genuine achievement is always the fruit of prodigious labor. To the perennial questions of “What shall I paint?” and “How shall I paint it?” Shahn replies: Live and think and try. Read endlessly, develop and test opinions, and above all, don’t stop painting.
A figurative realist in an age of high abstraction and an unabashed leftist at the height of the Cold War, Shahn was never quite at home in his own time. The accessibility and popularity of his work, and his sometimes-unfashionable humanism, made him a frequent target of critics during his life. And yet it is precisely these features that have since cemented Shahn as a giant of twentieth-century art. Today, his lectures offer potent lessons for anyone who shares his belief in the power of art to change minds and contest injustice.
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$22.95
Modern Art Despite Modernism
by Henri Matisse, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Robert Storr, Ben Shahn, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keeffe, Glenn Lowry, Balthus, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Beckmann, Francesco Clemente, George Grosz, Glenn D. Lowry
Throughout the twentieth century, the evolution of mainstream Modernism in the arts has been shadowed and made complex by alternative expressions of a seemingly retrograde type, art that appears to set back the clock or to redirect the stream of progress. Modern Art Despite Modernism explores the anti-Modernist impulse in painting and sculpture through socio-cultural conflicts of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Texts by Robert Storr advocate the strengths of this impulse in paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and even Pablo Picasso--and note the enduring popularity of such artists as Pavel Tchelitchew, whose "Hide and Seek," along with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," remain among the public's favorite pictures. Storr also discusses taste and its implications, both part and present, for institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. This book was published as the second in a series of three titles, in conjunction with the millennial exhibitions schedule of MoMA2000 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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The Shape of Content (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1956-1957) (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
by Ben Shahn
In his 1956–57 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, the Russian-born American painter Ben Shahn sets down his personal views of the relationship of the artist―painter, writer, composer―to his material, his craft, and his society. He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.
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