Education Quote by Josef Albers

Albers comes in hot against the most seductive alibi in the studio: “accident” as artistic destiny. He frames it like a bad habit, almost a superstition - the young artist collapsing “onto your knees,” grateful for a lucky spill or a surprise effect because it spares you the harder work of intention. The phrasing is bluntly pedagogical. He’s not romanticizing the muse; he’s policing responsibility.

The line’s real target is modern art’s favorite myth: that the best work is discovered, not made. Mid-century abstraction, especially in its more heroic American forms, loved the story of the painter as conduit for forces beyond control. Albers, with his Bauhaus DNA and his rigorous exercises in color and perception, refuses that mystique. His teaching (and the exaggeration of “a hundred years”) performs authority, but also impatience: he’s heard every student try to baptize uncertainty as spontaneity.

Subtext: accidents happen, but worshipping them is cowardice. Albers isn’t saying eliminate chance; he’s saying don’t outsource authorship to it. If something “you are not responsible for” becomes the centerpiece, the artist turns into a spectator of their own work, claiming credit for physics. That’s why the moral language matters: “falling onto your knees” evokes religious submission. He’s arguing for a secular studio ethic where discipline beats revelation, and where discovery only counts once you can repeat it, control it, or at least name it.