That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

Most of arts what comes from the States to Europe has something to do with entertainment. I can't imagine artists in the United States having the same kind of isolated position that we have here in Europe. I have a feeling one lives more publically in the States.

I remember that Michael Werner told me about a famous collector, and Michael set up an appointment for us to meet. This man looked around the room and at my pictures. Then he said, "Young man, why are you doing these horrible things? Look out the window. There are nice girls out there. It's springtime. Look at how beautiful the world can be. You'll ruin your health by smoking so much and doing such tortured things."

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.

There's a market for art, and things are indeed going swimmingly, especially for German artists. But everything takes place in America and in London, where there are quite a few wealthy, engaged people. What motivates them to buy art is a different question, but they do.