Josef Albers Quotes

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The whole thrust of modern art, as far as I understand it, is expanding the role of the artist as a kind of esthetician, someone who actually spends his time, is trained in a way to deal with qualities.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

As regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect that in these volumes I shall undoubtedly show myself of very considerable importance not only to builders but also to all scholars.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.