Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

Calm Down what happens happens mostly without you.

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

One line plus one line results in many meanings.

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

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.

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

color is the most relative medium in art

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Art problems are problems of human relationship.

I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.