Josef Albers Quotes

Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.

I do like how the music can be misunderstood.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

It is the heart that makes the critic, not the nose.

If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

The only enemy of art is taste.

I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

I see colors like you hear jet planes.

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime. That is not the color of red at all.

You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

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

Art is not nature... There was a lot more to be got out of color.

You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique.

It would be like describing colors to someone blind from birth: The words might be understood, but the concept would remain mysterious and private.

Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad; when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.