Josef Albers Quotes

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

If one says “Red” (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

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

In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

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.

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

Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it.

Color deceives continuously.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.

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

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

One line plus one line results in many meanings.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world.

Easy-to know that diamonds-are precious, Good-to learn that rubies-have depth, But more-to see that pebbles-are miraculous.

There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.

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.

In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness.

Independent of harmony rules, any color 'goes' or 'works' with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.

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.