Josef Albers Art Quotations

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

Art problems are problems of human relationship.

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

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

The aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth.

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

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

I do not consider self-expression as important. It's not important as a method of teaching. And it's not important as an aim of any art branch.