"I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one"

Albers presents color not as a passive property but as a partner in conduct. To “handle colour as a man should behave” suggests patience, humility, attentiveness, and responsibility. Color is notoriously deceptive and relational; any hue changes meaning beside another. Treating it well requires listening before acting, testing consequences, and avoiding domination by preconception. That stance resembles ethical comportment: respect for the other, responsiveness to context, and restraint in the face of impulse.

When he fuses ethics and aesthetics, he argues that how one makes is inseparable from what one makes. Clarity, economy, and rigor are not merely stylistic choices; they are moral gestures, commitments to honesty and to the discipline of perception. His pedagogy and practice, systematic experiments, limited means, and repeated formats, model integrity. He refuses theatrical effect in favor of precision, trusting that careful relationships will yield profound experience. The work does not coerce the viewer; it invites inquiry, training the eye to see difference where habit sees sameness. That is an ethical education in attention.

The Homage to the Square series crystallizes this union. Its apparent simplicity masks a complex field of interactions where no color dominates by fiat; each gains identity through relation. Such nonhierarchical balance is an ethical ideal translated into visual terms. Restraint becomes respect; consistency becomes reliability; surprise arises not from trickery but from truth revealed through method. Even the admission that “color deceives” is an ethical act, an artist stating the limits of certainty while crafting conditions for discovery.

Read today, the statement resists an era of spectacle and speed. It proposes a way of working in which care governs every decision, where aesthetics are not an escape from ethics but their enactment. To handle color well is to cultivate character: to proceed with honesty, patience, and regard for the effects one sets in motion.