Peter SAUL [American] (b. 1934) Automobile, circa 1959-60 Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Signed on the back. (Craquelures). 89 x 146 cm In 1956, Peter Saul discovered Europe. Two years later, at the age of 24, he settled in Paris, where for the next four years he moved from hotel to hotel. During this period, he painted in an abstract expressionist style at the American Center on boulevard Raspail. The artist frequented the Louvre and regularly visited prestigious galleries. A chance encounter in a Left Bank bookshop radically changed his painting. On a large table in the English-speaking bookshop Le Mistral, he discovered magazines such as Photoplay, MAD, LIFE and Confidential. These magazines immediately reminded him of the comic books he had loved as a child and teenager. Browsing the pages of comics and magazines, he realized that the characters of American culture and the expressive graphics offered him many subversive motifs for his own work. While his contemporaries pursued a pure abstraction that dominated the dialogue of the moment, the pages of magazines brimming with stories, iconography and expression became his source of inspiration.