Quotes by 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.
• I love very much to draw animals.
• I prefer to see with closed eyes.
• I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.
• 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.
• I was for years in the yellow period, you know.
• 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.
• I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.
• 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.
• I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.
• 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.
• 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.
• Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.
• 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.
• Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
• I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.
• I have invented the Thermometer style.
• I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.
• 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.
• Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.
• Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.
• Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
• 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.