Cre-art-tivity

My principal source of visual information is Muybridge, the photographer of the last 19th century who photographed human and animal movement. It's a work of unbelievable precision. He created a visual dictionary on movement, an animated dictionary. (...) For me, who doesn't have any models, it's an unbelievable source of inspiration. The images help me just as much to find ideas as to create them. I look at a lot of very different images, very contradictory and I take in details a bit like those people who eat off other people's plates. When I paint, I have the desire to paint an image that I am imagining, and this image transforms itself. I have also asked a photographer friend to do men fighting but that didn't work. People have always believed that I painted movement directly from photos, but that's completely wrong. I invent what I paint.

These are fairly obvious categories, and they are not the only divisions that the material at hand suggests. For there are significant differences in feeling and spirit to be discerned here. When Cornell uses a reproduction of another work of art in one of his boxes or collages, his attitude is not satirical. It is pious and loving, and the new work he creates is, in effect, a kind of valentine addressed to something he adores. The spirit of Mr. Saul's hilarious vulgarizations of Rembrandt, Picasso and de Kooning is radically different it is critical, analytical and irreverent.