Josef Albers Quotes

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

Independent of harmony rules, any color 'goes' or 'works' with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.

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

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

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

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

I love very much to draw animals.

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

A painter paints because he has no time not to paint.

Color deceives continuously.

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

One line plus one line results in many meanings.

I start from experience and read. . .always between polarities - loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud.

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

Easy-to know that diamonds-are precious, Good-to learn that rubies-have depth, But more-to see that pebbles-are miraculous.

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

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.

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

We never really perceive what color is physically!

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.

I have invented the Thermometer style.

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.

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

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

To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

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.

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.

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.

Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it.

We never really perceive what color really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

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.

I want color and form to have contradictorily functions.

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

Just as the unmusical ear is not competent to judge music, so it is likewise with pictures, whether they are paintings, drawings or photos. Only a sensitive and trained eye gives us the right to judge.

What has been said does not simply belong to us.

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

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.

Repeated similar experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from colors which it carries and therefore influences.