I Find The Romantic Period Extraordinarily Interesting.

A Work Of Art Is Itself An Object, First Of All, And So Manipulation Is Unavoidable: It's A Prerequisite. But I Needed The Greater Objectivity Of The Photograph In Order To Correct My Own Way Of Seeing: For Instance, If I Draw An Object From Nature, I Start To Stylize And To Change It In Accordance With My Personal Vision And My Training. But If I Paint From A Photograph, I Can Forget All The Criteria That I Get From These Sources. I Can Paint Against My Will, As It Were. And That, To Me, Felt Like An Enrichment.

Suddenly, I Saw It In A New Way, As A Picture That Offered Me A New View, Free Of All The Conventional Criteria I Had Always Associated With Art. It Had No Style, No Composition, No Judgment. It Freed Me From Personal Experience. For The First Time, There Was Nothing To It: It Was Pure Picture. That's Why I Wanted To Have It, To Show It - Not Use It As A Means To Painting But Use Painting As A Means To Photography.

As I See It, All Of Them - Tachists, Action Painters, Informel Artists, And The Rest - Are Only Part Of An Informel Movement That Covers A Lot Of Other Things As Well. I Think There's An Informel Element In Beuys, As Well; But It All Began With Duchamp And Chance, Or With Mondrian, Or With The Impressionists. The Informel Is The Opposite Of The Constructional Quality Of Classicism - The Age Of Kings, Or Clearly Formed Hierarchies.

What Attracted Me About My Mirrors Was The Idea Of Having Nothing Manipulated In Them. A Piece Of Bought Mirror. Just Hung There, Without Any Addition, To Operate Immediately And Directly. Even At The Risk Of Being Boring. Mere Demonstration. The Mirrors, And Even More The Panes Of Glass, Were Also Certainly Directed Against Duchamp, Against His Large Glass.

I Don't How I Can Describe The Quality That Is Only Found In Art (be It Music, Literature, Painting, Or Whatever), This Quality, It's Just There, And It Endures.