Josef Albers

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

“I have invented the Thermometer style.”

“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.”

“I love very much to draw animals.”

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

“Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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