Josef Albers Quotes

Art is an experience, not an object.

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

What is art but a way of seeing?

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

Art should create an experience.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.