"Shahn also used politically charged photographs, watering down their historical implications to make more generalized, universal images, as in "Brothers" (1946), a painting that borrowed from a news photograph of about 1944 (in one of his "War" folders) showing a survivor of Estonia’s Klooga death camp."

Laura Katzman, "The Politics of Media" in Ben Shahn’s New York,
Yale University Press, 2000

“Brothers” (1946) by Ben Shahn Tempera on wood, 24x36 inches © Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, NY.

"I think any artist, abstract or humanistic, will agree that art is the creation of human values. It may have cosmic extension. It may reflect cosmic abstraction. But however earnestly it reaches out into the never-never land of time-space, it will still always be an evaluation through the eyes of man. It may deny but can never cast off its human origin.

Trying to get away from content seems to me a little wistful—somewhat like Icarus trying to shed the earth. And at our particular point in history, it’s more than wistful; it appears almost to consort with those forces which would repudiate man and his culture as ultimate values.

We are living in a time when civilization has become highly expert in the art of destroying human beings and increasingly weak in its power to give meaning to their lives. I don’t know anyone on either side of the water or on either side of the political fence who has the slightest degree of optimism about the direction in which civilization is moving.

It is peculiarly within the province of the artist to minister to man in the somewhat starved area of the spirit. It is for the artist to discover new truths about man and to reaffirm that his life is significant. In this sense, I don’t mind being called a "realist," because I believe that these are the realities, the content, which gives to art its stature."

"In Finnegans Wake my finger rested on the words ‘the homely protestant,’ and I thought, ‘Of course, it is a self-portrait.’ ‘Homely’ in ‘the King’s English’ means a stay-at-home, a homebody—not what it means to us at all—and certainly that’s what Joyce meant when he used it."

quoted in Robert Motherwell, Harry N. Abrams, 1982

“The Homely Protestant (Bust)” (1947–48) by Robert Motherwell Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, NY

"In my own work, for instance, sometimes there is humor, a kind of ‘blague’ as a critic recently wrote, with different ranges of reference – technical, social, and perhaps even metaphysical – I am not sure. Sometimes my essential loneliness creeps into the work, or anguish. But I try to suppress these qualities. It is more seemly to keep one’s suffering to oneself. I resent it when I see that I was unable, on occasion, to muffle the shriek that lies deep in nearly everyone. My main effort is to come into harmony with myself, to paint as I breathe or move, or dream, to make works that are as natural in their execution, as inevitable in their ultimate form as a stone or a wall. To realize such an ideal is a lifelong task.

I take neither my subjects nor the modes of painting them from the world of intellectuals. I have been mainly a lyrical artist, a "poet," if you like, with occasional dramatic or satirical overtones. I loathe every form of ideology: politics, religion, aesthetics, domestic relations. I am interested in persons who are independent moral agents. Most "intellectuals" I have seen were quite properly labeled by friend of mine, Harold Rosenberg, the poet, as "a herd of independent minds." But I also dislike painters who talk as though they were carpenters or some other kind of craftsman, who speak as though art is not a question of inspiration—of something in you that rises as simply, beautifully, and unpredictably as the flight of a bird."