Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book
Rate this book
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.

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

57 people are currently reading
974 people want to read

About the author

Ben Shahn

106 books9 followers

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
358 (48%)
4 stars
228 (30%)
3 stars
123 (16%)
2 stars
22 (2%)
1 star
11 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
Profile Image for Michael.
1,094 reviews1,952 followers
June 3, 2018
This is a short book of essays based on lectures delivered by the artist at Harvard in 1957. I found it refreshing and pragmatic window into a great artist’s accumulated wisdom about art, suitable for an average reader like me. I am always a sucker for attempts to elucidate the mystery of artistic creation and identify how much art may be bound up with the core of human nature. Fuel against Pinker’s notion that art and music are just lucky collateral benefits of other talents with key adaptive value for fitness. While we wait for any convincing account by sociobiologists that art matters for our biological evolution, it is reassuring to get an angle on its importance for our cultural evolution. But we don’t need biology or even psychology or to get on board with the liberal arts mission to nurture the arts:

I have always believed that the character of a society is largely shaped and unified by its great creative works, that a society is molded upon its epics, and that it imagines in terms of its created things—its cathedrals, its works of art, its musical treasures, its literary and philosophical works.

Shahn spends some time on the struggle to assure the embrace of arts included immersion creative practice and not just art history and scholarly analysis. In my own experience as a biology major at a liberal arts college, I feel I benefitted greatly from taking elective courses on sculpture and playing table. Thus, he is preaching to the choir for me on the essay on art in education. Similarly, his essay of advice on prospective artists pursuing an education might be of more value to someone in that camp. Instead, I appreciated most his title essay “The Shape of Content” on the aesthetic debate over form versus content, and next in line one on the career of nonconformity most successful artists must forge and another on the beginnings of a universal standard for judging art.
The major thrust of the title essay is that form and content are inseparable, that “form is the very shape of content”. I see that as comparable to the inseparability of nature and nurture in biology. Regardless, there is much history of playing one against the other and minimalizing one of the other as primal impulse. Despite all the movements in art toward the plane of the abstract, Shahn argues for the ideas embodied in art as retaining a supreme value. The very denial of content in the drippings of Pollock or boxes of Albers stands in context of all that preceded them And that the particular content of a great work of art has its special impact by walking the line between the particular and the universal.

For form is not just the intention of content; it is the embodiment of content. Form is based, first, upon a supposition, a theme. Form is, second, a marshaling of materials, the inert matter in which the theme is to be cast. Form is, third, a setting of boundaries, of limits, the whole extent of idea, but no more, an outer shape of an idea. Form is, next, the relating of inner shapes to the outer limits, the initial establishing of harmonies. Form is, further, the abolishing of excessive content, of content that falls outside the true limits of the theme. …Form is thus a discipline, an ordering, according to the needs of content.

Against this thesis, Shahn has to contend with the pervasive school of criticism which he identifies in this credo of Clive Bell:
The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

Shahn is the type of artist who puts a lot of political perspectives into his own art. e are treated to the personal paths and artistic insights that infuses his own work. For example, he describes how he was led to subjects of the Dreyfus Affair, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and atrocities of World War 2 for some of his work. I can’t help but think of Picasso’s “Guernica”, which captures the terror of a bombing during the Spanish Civil War, when I read of his regret in the movement away from such humanistic concerns:

Many of those names that, during the thirties, had been affixed to paintings of hypothetical tyrannies and theoretical cures were now affixed to cubes and cones and threads and swirls of paint. Part of that work was—and is—beautiful and meaningful; part of it does indeed constitute private experience. A great part of it also represents only the rejection, only the absence of self-commitment.

His essay, “Biography of a Painting”, was a boon for me to read because of his sharing as much as possible the origins and pathways of his creative decisions for a particular work from 1948. As see below, this work, “Allegory” features a red Chimerical creature with its lion-like head full of flames hulking over a pile of four children. The work was inspired by and used for illustration of a magazine story about a Chicago tenement fire that killed a poor black man’s four children.



Imagine his shock when a critic whom he deemed a friend railed against the work as pro- communist and calling for Shahn’s deportation. In fact, he wanted to capture in as simple way as possible the monstrous horror of fire to a family. An overall form in the painting he later identified as subconscious is that of the Roman she-wolf that instead of suckling Romulus and Remus holds danger of devouring them instead, linked perhaps to fears of wolves inculcated into him from folktales from his Lithuanian childhood. The work portrays not a general horror, but a particular case of injustice revealed as what he calls “inner disaster” and bearing universal overtones. The interchange of unique individual experience and communal values among the viewers is captured nicely in the following:

One has sympathy with a hurt person, not because he is a generality, but precisely because he is not. Only the individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals. …In the work of art he finds his uniqueness affirmed.

I found a lot of common sense to his piece on evaluating art. He admits that “to criticize criticism is the irresistible sport of artists” and gives into that urge by this quote of a critic asked to compare the worth of Picasso and Dali:
“Oh, the answer is very simple. Picasso isan artist, and Dali is not.”

He takes the position that personal values and emotional responses are core foundations to critical assessment. After all, as he notes, “The critic with no values would be about as useful as an editorial writer with no opinions.” Still, there are quasi-objective standards he finds himself using in judging merit of art for himself. Aside from children’s paintings or the cases where the artist strives to remove it from the equation, competence and craft remain values that usually come into play. No one can deny supreme skills at work are at play even in Pollock and Albers. Conveying an idea or theme, even if it is an anti-idea bound in abstract minimalism, is a value he also appreciates, but ease of communication is not necessarily a virtue. A great example is the work of Turner, who strove to portray the essence of chaos and entropy free of standard forms and perspective, or Munch whose “The Scream” made a unique vision of a crying figure, neither of which lends itself to easy translation into concepts. Unfortunately, an important value for most critics (including the inner critic artists must nurture) is that of novelty and innovation:

Under such necessity art can be pushed to meaningless extremes. And it is a constant struggle to wrench out of the paint tube something that is still newer than new. Of course, when such work becomes dated, its emptiness emerges, for nothing is so hard to look at as the stylish, out of date.

Other values used in assessing artistic worth are more variable:
They are fortuitous values; they may be within the work or they may be within the viewer. Such values are the passing vagaries of taste; they are sometimes the principles deduced by art historians, such as the authenticity of the work; or they may be concerned with the curious accumulation of money value, but they are not innate. Then there are the formal values, inseparable from the work, but sometimes amenable to objective or comparative evaluations.

I particularly appreciated the way Shahn spoke of the value of freedom in art:
The concept of freedom in art takes interesting forms: freedom of execution, for instance, is a basis for evaluation. How often do we read the critical comment that this or that work appears “labored.” …Extreme care is “tight” and not good; extreme freedom is “loose” and considered desirable. Art becomes increasingly free; it has freed itself of craft, freed itself from academic discipline, freed itself from meaning in many cases, and freed itself of responsibility. ….
I too cherish the word freedom. But I want to be free to be painstaking if I want to, to be responsible, to be involved; to be free to exercise whatever intellect I may have, and I consider both discipline and craft indispensable to freedom.


I find the pleasure of Shahn’s collection as a clear and accessible framework for appreciating art on more dimensions than I have tended to. The experience was somewhat on the order of John Chardi’s “How Does a Poem Mean” for someone like me with very limited study of poetry. Most of all I liked getting a good dose of Shahn’s drawings, which provide background illustrations throughout the narrative. As I have been reading Homer and related readings on the Ancient Greeks, I was intrigued and pleased that his first illustration was this one, called “Homeric Struggle”, which to me speaks to the balance of beast and hero in human nature.

Profile Image for L.B. Holding.
Author 2 books12 followers
December 4, 2015
One of my favorite human beings recommended this book to me back in the late 70's and I only grazed upon it then, too busy with the reading and writing of academic obligations. Now, on the cusp of retirement, I find it on my library's shelf, and it turns out to be his book, not given to me, but actually and personally inscribed by his mother, who is/was/will always be, way, way smarter than me. And a true artist, to boot. I thank them both, for letting me house this little volume in my house for the past, what, FOUR decades. It made me think again. I will mail it to him right away, but in the meanwhile, here's my favorite quote from The Shape of Content:

"Without the person of outspoken opinion, however, without the critic, without the visionary, without the nonconformist, any society of whatever degree of perfection must fall into decay."

Here's hoping that our society will not decay, but will stand true and strong because of our nonconformists, our visionaries, our critics.
Profile Image for Papaphilly.
299 reviews74 followers
May 27, 2020
I did not enjoy this book. It is not the books fault. I think it was not aimed at me and I just could not enjoy it. having said this, i think if you are an art major or art historian, I think this may be an essential read. For me, just does not make sense, except the last chapter. There is lots to ponder on and for an artist, it is great thoughts. for the non-artist, I am not so sure it is much worth the time. I am not the audience for this one.
Profile Image for Nat.
720 reviews81 followers
Read
January 6, 2023
In college I had the feeling that art had socially transformative power, and my sense of art was that it was basically painting. That was reinforced by taking art history classes where we learned to identify the great works (mostly paintings, with some sculpture). Reading this caused me to have pleasant flashbacks to those days, where the choice of a particular style went with writing or endorsing corresponding world-historical manifestos, and it was possible to have long, seemingly meaningful arguments about, e.g. the relative value of form vs. content (the subject of the title essay). I had a long argument with my now wife outside the Hirschhorn museum in D.C. about whether form should follow function or vice versa. Some of the content of these essays is wonderfully 50s—lots of Freud, mention of the Organization Man, debates about whether Picasso or Dali is a real artist, a clear grasp that there is something that is the avant-garde, even if the attitude of the author is, as he says, to Épater la avant garde.
290 reviews
April 16, 2020
A set of essays that are interesting but obviously dated. Women painters? Apparently non-existent. Written by a painter talking about painting and what it means to be a painter. Some of the essays meander, lose focus. More suited to someone with more art knowledge than I have.
155 reviews19 followers
April 29, 2012
As much love as I have for Ben Shahn


Farewell to New York



Handball.

Shape of Content does not have 1.0 books worth of ideas, length adjusted. The last essay, "Education of an Artist," has some choice excerpts destined to be reborn as rebloggable tumblr directives
Go to an art school, or two, or three, or take art courses at night if necessary. And paint and paint and draw and draw. Know all that you can, both curricular and noncurricular – mathematics and physics and economics, logic, and particularly history.
but few of the other essays felt particularly essential.
Profile Image for Chris.
47 reviews1 follower
October 4, 2014
I first read "The Shape of Content" as an undergraduate painting student when I was reading everything about art and artmaking that I could get my hands on, trying to figure out what (and why, and how) I was doing. At that time I found it inspiring, especially the last essay on "The Education of the Artist".

Re-reading the book 22 years later, I am struck by what a deeply thoughtful person Shahn was, how articulately he described what goes into the making of art in “Biography of a Painting”, and how well it matches my own experience.
Profile Image for Zack Ashkar.
25 reviews
March 20, 2024
as someone who isn’t the best at analyzing or speaking about art (even tho i work at an art museum 😂), this book was definitely very insightful and made me think abt different aspects of art that i’ve never thought abt before. it was a little repetitive at times but that last chapter was super inspiring and led me to finish this book with a smile :D
Profile Image for LemontreeLime.
3,641 reviews17 followers
February 27, 2009
Worth finding, worth reading, and most of all worth reading the last essay "the education of the artist" several times to catch different things at different times. I forsee rereading this whole book again this year.
1 review1 follower
December 28, 2018
A Biography of a Painting is one the best essays about art-making I have ever read. Buy a copy for anyone you know who is making art.
Profile Image for Laura.
159 reviews2 followers
July 11, 2024
This made me feel both content and useless as a self-proclaimed recreational artist. In his collection of six short essays, Mr. Shahn critiques the soul-sucking institutionalization that academia creates for artists, only to emphasize that higher education for artists is actually very beneficial. Through comparisons to groundbreaking artists in history, he makes us think about the role art plays not only in our lives but in those around us.

I really loved this book. I felt connected to the genuine words on the pages, and the art throughout was simple yet impactful, furthering Ben's message. This ultimately strengthened his arguments, prompting readers to question their assumptions about art and its purpose. However, I sometimes found the passages too obvious, as the author tells you what to think instead of allowing open-ended interpretation. While this aligns with his central argument about the importance of shape and content, it ironically contradicts his points by suggesting a lack of confidence in the content if it doesn't allow for true introspection.

Despite my criticism, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand paintings better or who believes art is useless.
1 review
September 22, 2018
I adored this book. The only reason it didn’t give it 5 stars is because I reserve honor that for the life changing books, which this isn’t— at least not for me.

If you are not an artist or are not interested in the conversations surrounding art, don’t read this.

If you ARE an artist— especially one who has ever felt limited by labels that feel arbitrary or never quite right, one who has felt invalidated by art critics, one who has ever wondered WHAT to do or HOW to do, especially how to do in the face of society, read this.

To me, this felt like a book of affirmations. It was educational, of course, and I was exposed to a few ideas that I had never considered before. But more importantly, Shaun’s words pulse with encouragement. I felt like I had gone to the office hours of a friendly professor after a rough semester and been told all the things I desperately needed to hear.

If you need inspiration, education, and a little kick in the butt, this book is perfect.

Also, it’s a very quick read; I finished it one day! So why not give it a go?

Profile Image for Marty.
266 reviews14 followers
December 31, 2022
These lectures from the late fifties feel timeless in many ways. Shahn is a painter who sees and perceives and writes (tells) well; his lessons, for the artist, are universal.

It comes down to the education: three conditions 1) to be cultured 2) to be educated 3) to be integrated; and three major problems (plus a fourth, not so so minor problem) 1) what to paint (what to make) 2) how to paint it (how to make it) and 3) how to live aka what security will I have as a painter (maker)?
4) FOR WHOM DOES ONE PAINT (make)?

“No one can promise success to an intended painter. Nor is the problem of painting one of success at all. It is rather one of how much emphasis one places upon self realization, upon the things that he thinks.”
Profile Image for Fareea Asif.
6 reviews1 follower
October 29, 2022
It was refreshing to read the views of a painter talking about painting and other related themes with respect to the role of art in contemporary society. There are so many take aways not just for emerging artists but also for practicing artists. I liked his thoughts on art criticism and interpretation and its relevance in creating community.
Especially enjoyed the last chapter 'The education of an artist'
which has some valuable pointers for those embarking on an art career.
Profile Image for Meg Coulson.
297 reviews3 followers
February 24, 2021
I can definitely see why this book is such an integral part of so many MFA programs. As a college instructor and creative, chapters 1 and 2 especially spoke to my own experiences teaching and dealing with administrative stuff while still staying true to my own creative works. The final chapter is something I’d love to share with my own students.
Profile Image for Marge.
175 reviews11 followers
June 21, 2023
I am starting my MFA this summer so I will probably be spending more time reading art books. This is a collection of lectures given by the artist Ben Shahn at Harvard in the 1950s. A lot of things I liked and a few things I didn't like - it felt a little outdated at times. I do really love Shahn's paintings though.

This book would probably only appeal to people interested in art.
Profile Image for Russell.
38 reviews6 followers
May 24, 2017
Lucid account of a variety questions in the practice of painting and developing yourself and ideas.

Enjoyed the first chapter of questions and responses regarding a university education and the role of art.
Profile Image for Sheree.
Author 1 book
December 8, 2019
Some very interesting philosophical ideas are presented. However, I found myself bogged down in the density of the subject matter. Perhaps not a good winter time read. I will pick this up again in the spring and give it another chance.
Profile Image for Sara.
599 reviews3 followers
November 22, 2022
Read for Popsugar: A book you own but have never read

I'm pretty sure a lot of this went over my head, but I really liked the last essay - The Education of an Artist.

Profile Image for Evelyn.
1,335 reviews5 followers
August 3, 2025
In a series of essays drawn from lectures given by the author at Harvard University, the author ponders the questions what is art, and how does one become an artist?
Profile Image for Stephanie.
45 reviews8 followers
November 14, 2011
I read some of it years ago but never finished it until today. I keep seeing the word Renaissance community everywhere. "Our values are prsumably those things which we hold most dear. They are those matters which call fourth our most enthusiastic participation, or towards which we are most compassionate about. Beliefs that light the way we behave.


http://www.career-iq.com/mbti/enfp


http://www.eiconsortium.org/reports/t...

Bringing Emotional Intelligence to the Workplace: A Technical Report Issued by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in OrganizationsBy: Cary Cherniss, Daniel Goleman, Robert Emmerling, Kim Cowan, & Michel Adler


http://www.rand.org/qatar/about/appro...


3 measurable quantities of light are:

* Luminous intensity-- which refers to the brightness of a light source
* Luminous flux-- is the rate at which light is emitted from a source and strikes the surface of a whole sphere
* Illumination-- is the deliberate application of light to achieve some aesthetic or practical effect



http://www.the-friendship-cafe.com/Qu...
Profile Image for Sharon.
270 reviews9 followers
March 6, 2016
How do we, as people living in the United States, regard artists, and how are those hopes reflected (or not) in universities, art criticism, and the canon? These are the questions Shahn sets out to answer in his famous lectures. The title lecture seems to get the most attention, but I enjoyed more his thoughts on non-conformity--the celebration of and its discontents--which is a matter of form in its own sense.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.