Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
Josef Albers

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

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.
Josef Albers

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

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.
Josef Albers

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.
Josef Albers

I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.
Josef Albers

I have invented the Thermometer style.
Josef Albers

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

I love very much to draw animals.
Josef Albers


I prefer to see with closed eyes.
Josef Albers

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.
Josef Albers

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.
Josef Albers

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.
Josef Albers

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.
Josef Albers

I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.
Josef Albers

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

If you don't do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.
Josef Albers

In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.
Josef Albers

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.
Josef Albers