Creativity Quote by Josef Albers

“I think” is doing almost as much work here as “friends.” Albers isn’t name-dropping Kandinsky so much as calibrating distance: close enough to claim intimacy, careful enough not to overstate it. That small hedge reads like Bauhaus etiquette in miniature, where personal bonds existed inside a culture of ideas, workshops, and rival aesthetics. Saying they were “very near friends” suggests a proximity that’s social, intellectual, even architectural: two men moving through the same corridors, critiques, and committees, their relationship shaped as much by institutional life as by affection.

The phrasing also carries the quiet politics of art history. Kandinsky is the canonized pioneer of abstraction; Albers, often cast as the disciplined pedagogue of color and perception, can be flattened into a teacher’s teacher. By positioning himself as near to Kandinsky, Albers subtly re-enters the origin story of modernism from the inside, not as a follower but as a witness with standing. It’s a claim to adjacency to genius without the cheapness of “we were close,” a tone that fits Albers’s own aesthetic: precision, restraint, no excess.

Context matters: these were artists whose lives were split by exile and the rupture of European modernism. “Were” suggests a past tense complicated by history, not just time. The line reads like a recollection trimmed of sentimentality, the way modernists often handled emotion: implied, compressed, structurally sound.