Education Quote by Josef Albers

Safety is the first villain in Josef Albers' memory. A teaching job is "safe" not because it feeds the soul, but because it placates the people who worry about rent, reputation, and the shame of ambition that might not pan out. When Albers calls painting "terrible", he's not just describing difficulty; he's naming the social scandal of choosing a life whose value can't be measured in steady paychecks or respectable titles. "Terrible" carries the old meaning too: awe-inducing, destabilizing, the kind of calling that rearranges a life and alarms everyone watching from the shore.

The subtext is a family negotiating risk through someone else's body. Albers' "you see" is doing quiet work: an appeal to shared common sense, the vernacular of pressure that never needs to raise its voice. It suggests he still understands the logic, even as he rejects it. That's why the line bites. He doesn't caricature the family's fear; he makes it legible, which is what gives his refusal moral weight.

Context sharpens the stakes. Born in 1888, Albers comes up in a Europe where the bourgeois ladder mattered and modern art looked, to many, like a career in public embarrassment. Before Bauhaus fame and Black Mountain influence, "painter" wasn't a brand; it was a gamble. The quote captures the hinge between craft as respectable labor (teaching) and art as existential wager (painting), a choice that would later define Albers' entire project: disciplined perception built from an initial act of disobedience.