Picasso, the great thief

By Kate Lim

Henri Matisse wrote in a letter to his son in 1946 after Picasso visited him, “Picasso had seen what he wanted, my paper cut-outs, my new paintings…all of it will ferment in his mind to his advantage.” Matisse’s words were not meant to downplay Picasso or reciprocate Picasso’s previous pejoratives about his own work. He meant his rival was actually a thief. He added “Picasso is not straightforward. Everyone has known that the last 40 years.” Echoing Matisse’s judgement, some art insiders comment that Picasso’s “La Paix”(1952) rings out Matisse’s characteristic simplicity and might have been a reverential thievery of Matisse’s “Le Bonheur de vivre”(1905-06).

It was not only Matisse whom Picasso had taken the liberty of putting to his own use en route to his prodigious accomplishments. He nonchalantly plundered the masters of the past both distant and immediate. In the early phases of the artistic development, he fell under the spell of the Romanesque art from his native Catalonia, Gothic art and El Greco’s work of the 16th century.

During the beginning of the 20thcentury when he first settled in Paris, the works of Ingres, Manet, Czanne, Gauguin and Matisse touched on Picasso who announced himself as a protean creator in his famous quote: “The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.” It is a well-known fact that his most famous “Les Demoiselle d’Avignon” (1907), which was sold at $179.3 million at a Christies’ auction in New York in May this year, breaking the world record of the highest-priced artwork, has a trace of incorporating eclectic sources from the African mask and Cézanne’s geometrical language. Picasso was a regular visitor of the Louvre to study and copy. Many agree that Picasso’s success came about through his knack for creating an indefatigable synthesis of what he freshly discovered.

Some of his syntheses were direct adaptations or transpositions of other artists’ works and actually made his own look less authentic. For example, “Two Women at a Bar” (1902) or “Crouching Nude” (known as Blue Nude,1902) exploited the expressive qualities of women’s backs which were resourced from Gauguin. One can detect without much difficulty the similarities and derivativeness in spite of the moody dress-up.

Yet, Picasso being Picasso, raised his artistic thievery to a unique level and produced stunning transformations that eludedeasy deconstruction. Most of his works were “an unnavigable maze”. Have a look at “Woman with a Fan” (1905). As the title of the painting suggests, it depicts the profile of a girl holding a fan in one hand. A striking feature of the girl’s posture is the way she raises her other hand in relation to the hand holding a fan. It is said that the resulting totality of her pose is a synthesis of Velázquez’s “Woman with a Fan” (1638-39) and the image of Augustus with his hand raised from Ingres’s “Tu Marcellus Eris” (1819). This kind of combination can be attributed to the Picassian genius of stealing.

However, his real genius lies in extracting the conceptual essence of other artists. Ingres’ Augustus is glacially frozen as in a sculptural marble. It has been observed that Picasso instilled the frozenness into the image of the girl, endowing her with fresh monumentality of a hieratic gesture. One cannot entirely deny the vestiges of these original sources, yet the work is no less than a transubstantiation sealed with Picasso’s perceptual and painterly virtuosity.

Picasso certainly used or stole existing creations to transplant them in his own conceptual imagination. Like many great creators, however, he did not lose his personal perceptive energy in the throes of curiosity, envy and admiration. From there it grew into another creation thriving on the irresistible confluence of resemblance and difference.

I often wonder what would have happened to Picasso if the current level of morality on “plagiarism” had been applied to him. His artistic career might have been doomed to a mediocre painter if he had been condemned for plagiarism in his early days. He surely imitated and stole but, as his career progressed, he transformed his thievery into a genuine synthesis. This may be a natural course of any creative development, which we should have in mind, in watching those who are in pursuit of art.

Kate Lim is director of Art Platform Asia, an independent curator and art writer.