Josef Albers famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Teaching #Giving

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

#Real

Art problems are problems of human relationship.
-- Josef Albers

#Art #Problem #Humans

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

#Men #May #Ethics

I prefer to see with closed eyes.
-- Josef Albers

#Eye #Perception #Closed Eyes

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

#Mean #Men #Thinking

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

#Color #Names #People

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

#Art #Creative #Secret

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

#Color #Differences #Cooking

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

#Appreciation #Fashion #Art

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

#Effort #Different #Honest

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision.
-- Josef Albers

#Art #Believe #Mean

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

#Talkers

We never really perceive what color is physically!
-- Josef Albers

#Color #Perceive

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

#Imagination #World #Mystery

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

#Color #Musical

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

#Resonance

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

#Suicide #Way #My Way

In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.
-- Josef Albers

#Light #Order #Color

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

#Art #Philosophy #People

I love very much to draw animals.
-- Josef Albers

#Animal #Draws

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

#Teacher #Art #School

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

#Teacher #Safe #My Family

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

#Art #Attitude #Roles

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

#Art #Jobs #Attitude

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

#Art #Differences #Invention

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

#Men #Squares #Salt

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

#Creativity #Discovery #Opinion

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

#Art #Air #Order

A thing is never seen as it really is.
-- Josef Albers

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

#Art #Tradition #Historian

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

#Father #Parent #Theatre

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

#Heart #Painting #Curious

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

#Jobs #Teaching #Government

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

#Father #Glasses #House

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

#Years #Yellow #Periods

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

#Color #Craziness #Dishes

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

#Exercise #Color #Different

One line plus one line results in many meanings.
-- Josef Albers

#Lines #One Line #Results

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

#Paint #Painter

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

#Color #Want #Form

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

#Color #Perception #Illusion

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

#Art #Color #Facts

Color deceives continuously.
-- Josef Albers

#Color #Deceiving

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

#Years #Secret #Beginners

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

#Color #Hue #Influence

I have invented the Thermometer style.
-- Josef Albers

#Style #Thermometers

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

#Way #Paint #Spread

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

#Art #Men #Thinking

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

#Depth #Rubies #Pebbles

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

#Heart #Color #Hue

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

#Independent #Color #Harmony

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

#Art #Purpose #Purpose Of Art

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

#Art #Art Is

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

#Art #Expression #Done

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

#Thinking #Kandinsky

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

#Way #Taught #Students

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

#Artist #Individualism #Scientist