Josef Albers
Josef Albers

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

Josef Albers
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
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
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
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
Josef Albers

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Josef Albers
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
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
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
Josef Albers

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

Josef Albers
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
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
Josef Albers

I have invented the Thermometer style.

Josef Albers
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
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
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
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
Josef Albers

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

Josef Albers
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.