Albers Quotes & Sayings

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. — Josef Albers

So sing, you birds
for the fever is about to rise
and the empty stalemate is over
let the colors bleed back into you
and let the dead be buried for another year.
from let the colors bleed — K.R. Albers

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

Art problems are problems of human relationship. — 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

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 ... — 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

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

I want color and form to have contradictorily functions. — Josef Albers

Change is a constant machine, but not one designed by human hands.
from changeING — K.R. Albers

In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness. — Josef Albers

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

A longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means within oneself: For creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know. — Anni Albers

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends. — Josef Albers

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

What has been said does not simply belong to us. — Josef Albers

A thing is never seen as it really is. — 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 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 first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc. — Gerhard Richter

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

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT. — 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

In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually. — 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

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

Every man can change, no matter how long it takes;
patience and persistence. — K.R. Albers

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. — Josef Albers

Inspiration.
five minutes in the back of a greyhound bus;
the world passing by.
a gateway to freedom.
the american dream.
from the american dream — K.R. 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

I worry that independence will never feel safe again. — K.R. 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

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

There's a freedom to simplicity;
a love that only grow in small spaces
killing yourself ever so slowly
to put a smile on your child's face
from born to fly — K.R. Albers

We were all born to the same world but with much greater circumstance
but with these two hands and what I have been given
I will build so much more
from Dexterity — K.R. Albers

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another. — Josef Albers

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. — Josef Albers

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. — Josef Albers

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air. — Josef Albers

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended ... I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words. — Robert Rauschenberg

The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world. — 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 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

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials. — Anni Albers

I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel. — Josef Albers

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. — Josef Albers

I only wear suits to funerals and I only cash checks when the bank is about to take the house.
from surely he's dead by now — K.R. Albers

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. — Josef Albers

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

I love very much to draw animals. — Josef Albers

Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical? — Josef Albers

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

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

We were born for sorrow
we were born for pain
we were born for loss
but we were also born to love
from follow your heart — K.R. Albers

Changing what you eat isn't going to help unless you start managing your stress level, — Susan Albers

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

I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator. — Josef Albers

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

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience. — Josef Albers

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

The aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth. — Josef Albers

There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations. — 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

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

Calm Down
what happens
happens mostly
without you. — 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 still remember our first meeting, when Albers brought him to my house. On the little carriage which carried him from the station, and which was hardly built with such loads in mind, sat a massive figure who appeared even more enormous by virtue of the thick overcoat he wore. Everything about him had the effect of extraordinary permanence and solidity: the deep bass voice; the tweed jacket, already, at that time, almost habitual; the appetite at dinner; and at night, the truly Cyclopean snoring, loud as a series of buzz saws, which frightened the other guests at my Chiemgau country house out of their peaceful slumbers. — Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

One line plus one line results in many meanings. — 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

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision. — 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

As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. — Josef Albers

There is no punishment man can bring down on another man's head more powerful than forgiveness — K.R. Albers

I have invented the Thermometer style. — 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

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

I prefer to see with closed eyes. — Josef Albers

I felt a lot better; not being alone in being alone. — K.R. Albers