User:LBattich/Joseph Albers on Colour

"For me colour is the means of my idiom. It's automatic." – Quoted in Neil Welliver,'Albers on Albers,' Art News, Jan 1966, p68.

"There is plenty of leeway for me. There are sometimes three squares, sometimes four... I don't care to be scientific and explore all the possibilities. To be complete is of no interest to me at all. I deal with what tickles me." (Ibid.)

“It seemed I was seeking a way to put paint in the service of art while freeing it from the harness of depiction or narration. To let color be its own narrative through its combination and by the palpability of painted fields.” Frederick Spratt, Trooping the Colors (Santa Clara: Triton Museum of Art, 2004) p. 8.

"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."

"In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually. To this end, the beginning is not a study of color systems.

"First, it should be learned that one and the same color evokes innumerable readings. Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced-through recognition of the interaction of color-by making, for instance, two very different colors look alike, or nearly alike."

"Colour in my opinion, behaves like a man ... in two distinct ways: first in self-realisation and then in the realisation of relationships with others. ..." – Interview with Josef Albers in Katherine Kuh, The Artist's Voice, New York, 1962, p16.

[Albers' works] demonstrate the surprisingly complex range of effects and meanings that can be produced with such simple and apparently repetitive working methods. – Paul Overy, Josef Albers, Exh. Cat., The South Bank Centre, 1994.p13.

John Gage, Colour and Culture, p266: "Albers seems to have wanted to exclude any sense of predictability, of hypothesis, from his account of the functioning of this powerful Gestalt."