"How could I, coming back from a world of such inhumanity, still love men, to the point of wanting to make portraits of them? For a long time thereafter I lost the definition of man, but today I think I have found it again, and it seems to me once again that the essence of art must be to place this human being in his century, it seems to me that this is what First, what can my satisfaction as a painter come to me. In fact, I have never ceased to think that the painter's job is to express the relationship between men and their time. " Miklos Bokor, extract from the interview with Yves Bonnefoy, fall 1996.