Words matter. These are the best Josef Albers Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I love very much to draw animals.
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.
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.
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.
I was for years in the yellow period, you know.
Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.
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.
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.
I’m not a talker. I’m a formulator.
I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.
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.
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.
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
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.
In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.
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.
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.
