Quotes from Josef Albers

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.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

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

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

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.