A Quote by Ben Shahn

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

Ben Shahn

Quote Topics

Art Art Love Art Lovers Devoted Great Great Man Having Himself Living Living Room Living Room Wall Lovers Many May Point Pride Prospects Put Room Room Wall Van Van Gogh Wall Would

Quote Author

Ben Shahn
Lithuanian - Artist
September 12, 1898 - March 14, 1969

I had a Vincent van Gogh, a small Provençal landscape. We sold it. If you're going to have a van Gogh it should be a really good van Gogh.

Pierre Berge

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. - Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother

Hokusai

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

Juliet Stevenson

Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I described visualizing numbers in abstract, meaningful shapes.

Daniel Tammet

I want to be remembered. I want to have a legacy. Van Gogh only sold one painting before he died, which would mean that he wasn't famous when he was alive. But in 2017, I know who Van Gogh is.

J.I.D

Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.

Roy Blount, Jr.

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

David Hockney

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures but that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.

John Russell

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

D. H. Lawrence

One association with the arts that I vividly remember was a magazine called Normal Instructor, a teachers' magazine, that Miss George would hold up with illustrations of great artworks like [Vincent] van Gogh and Rembrandt [van Rijn].

Paul Smith

I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn't I would never write anything else.

Irving Stone

It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.

Antonin Artaud

Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.

Albert Brooks

Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture... like Van Gogh... so who's to say what's good and bad?

Frank Gehry

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.