Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
Josef Albers
2
Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.
Josef Albers
3
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
4
I do not consider self-expression as important. It's not important as a method of teaching. And it's not important as an aim of any art branch.
Josef Albers
5
I have invented the Thermometer style.
Josef Albers
6
I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.
Josef Albers
I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.
Josef Albers
10
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
11
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
12
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
13
It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.
Josef Albers
14
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
15
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
16
Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.
Josef Albers
17
Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.
Josef Albers
18
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
Josef Albers
19
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
20
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
