Josef Albers Quotes

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

- Josef Albers

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

- Josef Albers

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.

- Josef Albers

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

- Josef Albers

You see, I have in my teaching - I always say I've done it for a hundred years and have had thousands of students - I have always spoken against just falling onto your knees for so-called accidents, I mean a result you are not responsible for.

- Josef Albers

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

- Josef Albers

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

- Josef Albers

When I came from horizontal vertical straight all old stuff then suddenly I go also again in curved lines. And there I submit to changes in the intensity of my hand leading a tool, you see.

- Josef Albers

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

- Josef Albers

The aim of our studies is to prove that color is the most relative means of artistic expression, that we never really perceive what color is physically.

- Josef Albers

I have invented the Thermometer style.

- Josef Albers

In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.

- Josef Albers

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.

- Josef Albers

Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets.

- Josef Albers

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

- Josef Albers

Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

- Josef Albers

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

- Josef Albers

On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.

- Josef Albers

When we are honest - that's my saying - if we are honest then we will reveal ourselves. But we do not have to make an effort to be individualistic, different from others.

- Josef Albers

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

- Josef Albers

When we were in the seminary we got a stipend direct from the government and for that stipend we had an obligation to stick to our teaching job for five years.

- Josef Albers

My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.

- Josef Albers

I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.

- Josef Albers

I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.

- Josef Albers

If you don't do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.

- Josef Albers

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.

- Josef Albers

I love very much to draw animals.

- Josef Albers

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

- Josef Albers

I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.

- Josef Albers

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.

- Josef Albers

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

- Josef Albers

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

- Josef Albers