Josef Albers Short Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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I want color and form to have contradictorily functions.

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

Josef Albers
A painter works to formulate with or in colors... My paintings follow the second option.

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

Josef Albers
The concern of the artist is with the discrepancy between physical fact and psychological effect.

Josef Albers
Every perception of colour is an illusion.... we do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

Josef Albers
Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical?

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

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
For me, abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I'll go further and say that abstraction is nearer my heart. I prefer to see with closed eyes.

Josef Albers
If one says 'Red' 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.

Josef Albers
I would say, 'My things have the look of icons.' Unconsciously they look at you not as my face is now – you see me in profile – icons are only this way. And so are my paintings.

Josef Albers
Seeing several of these paintings [his series paintings 'Hommage to the square', painted in 1963-64] next to each other makes it obvious that each painting is an instrumentation on its own.

Josef Albers