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Social Realist Painter, Photographer
1898-1969
"Art, as I saw it one day when I helped hang a National Academy show while I was a student there, was about cows. In those days, early in the twenties, there were many cow paintings. More than that, the cows always stood knee-deep in purple shadows. For the life of me I never learned to see purple where there was no purple -- and I detested cows. I was frankly distressed at the prospects for me as an artist.
But there came a time when I stopped painting, stopped in order to evaluate all these doubts. If I couldn't see purple where there was no purple--I wouldn't use it. If I didn't like cows, I wouldn't paint them. What then was I to paint? Slowly I found that I must paint those things that were meaningful to me--that I could honestly paint in the shapes and colors I felt belonged to them. What shall I paint? Stories." - Ben Shahn, quoted by Katherine Kuh (found at Constable.net)*
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 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first retrospective exhibition. The exhibition included many of his signature subjects: Victorian houses, New York restaurants, automats, drugstores, and bridges, as well as views into quiet, middle-class apartments. Also in the exhibition were paintings from his summer travels to Gloucester, Maine and after 1930, from Truro on Cape Cod. In 1934, he and his wife Jo built a house in Truro where they spent almost every summer.**
*from artcyclopedia.com **from wikipedia.com