Top 50 Josef Albers Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Josef Albers

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Josef Albers

5. “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

6. “Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting.”

— Josef Albers

7. “I prefer to see with closed eyes.”

— Josef Albers

8. “One line plus one line results in many meanings.”

— Josef Albers

9. “If one says ‘Red’ – the name of color – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.”

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

11. “Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.”

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

15. “Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision.”

— Josef Albers

16. “Art problems are problems of human relationship.”

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

18. “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

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

— Josef Albers

20. “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.”

— Josef Albers

21. “Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that’s the difference!”

— Josef Albers

22. “Color deceives continuously.”

— Josef Albers

23. “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

24. “I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel.”

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

26. “I want color and form to have contradictorily functions.”

— Josef Albers

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.”

— Josef Albers

30. “A thing is never seen as it really is.”

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

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

— Josef Albers

33. “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

34. “In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”

— Josef Albers

35. “I’m not a talker. I’m a formulator.”

— Josef Albers

36. “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

37. “It’s the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.”

— Josef Albers

38. “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

39. “Independent of harmony rules, any color ‘goes’ or ‘works’ with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.”

— Josef Albers

40. “In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness.”

— Josef Albers

41. “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

42. “If you don’t do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.”

— Josef Albers

43. “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

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

— Josef Albers

45. “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

46. “I’ve handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.”

— Josef Albers

47. “I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.”

— Josef Albers

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Josef Albers