Creativity Quote by Josef Albers

Albers slips a quiet knife into the mythology of artistic pedigree. He names Stuck as "a big man" and concedes the currency of reputation ("He had a good name at that time"), then undercuts the whole thing with the flat admission: it "didn't interest me". The tone is almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. He’s describing an institution that trades in prestige, and an education that can be socially valuable while aesthetically dead.

The most revealing pivot is ignorance: "I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee...". Today, that lineage reads like a golden ticket, proof that Stuck’s classroom was a conduit to modernism. Albers frames it as irrelevant information he only learned later, suggesting that influence is not a guaranteed inheritance and that biography can be a retroactive story we tell to make careers look inevitable. The art world loves a clean genealogy; Albers insists it was messier, contingent, even accidental.

Context matters: Albers is an artist of disciplined perception, famously wary of romantic narratives about genius. His Bauhaus-era ethos prized seeing and making over name-dropping. So this isn’t just a modest recollection; it’s a critique of credentialism. A "big man" can produce great artists without being their engine. The engine, Albers implies, is attention - to materials, to color, to the work itself - not the halo of the teacher or the after-the-fact glow of famous classmates.