Josef Albers

“You see, I have in my teaching - I always say I've done it for a hundred years and have had thousands of students - I have always spoken against just falling onto your knees for so-called accidents, I mean a result you are not responsible for.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I prefer to see with closed eyes.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.”