Beg, Steal or Borrow: Ingres and Picasso on Imitation and Inspiration

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 'Madame Moitessier'

'You can’t steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it, you can have it.'
Dizzy Gillespie

I recently attended a very small exhibition. 

‘Picasso Ingres: Face to Face’ at the National Gallery, London (until 9 October) comprises just two paintings: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ 1856 portrait of Madame Moitessier, and Pablo Picasso’s 1932 work, ‘Woman with a Book.’ 

These two great portraits share the same pose and composition. But they are radically different. Seeing them together, side-by-side, one gets the opportunity to consider the issues of imitation and inspiration.

‘Who is there, among the greats, who has not imitated? Nothing is made with nothing…’
Ingres

Ingres accepted the commission to paint Ines Moitessier, the young wife of a wealthy banker in 1844. But it took him 12 years to finish it. Work was delayed by the sitter having a baby and the artist losing his spouse. He also hesitated over the best pose and the most appropriate gown.

Eventually Ingres, a devoted classicist, settled on a composition inspired by a Roman fresco from Heraculaneum: it depicted the goddess Arcadia seated with her head propped on one hand.

Roman fresco from Heraculaneum, Hercules finding his son, Telephos

Madame Moitessier regards us with a finger of her right hand resting casually on her temple. She sits on a red satin chair and wears a dress of white Lyon silk, patterned with fragile flowers, decorated with bows and brocade. Her skin is pale as alabaster, though there is a slight rosy glow on her cheeks. Her expression is sensitive, serene, imperious and knowing. She is confident in her position in society, her rank confirmed by the expensive jewels pinned to her frock and hanging from her neck and wrist; by the Chinese porcelain and silk fan in the background. There is a mirror positioned behind her and we see her profile in reflection. It is if we can glimpse her interior as well as her exterior self.

Picasso saw Ingres’s painting of Madame Moitessier in Paris in 1921, when it was put on public display for the first time. It must have left an abiding impression. When, over 10 years later, he embarked on a portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, he asked her to adopt the same pose as Madame Moitessier.

As in Ingres’ portrait, Walter sits with her right arm resting on a chair, her hand splayed at the side of her head and a finger to her temple. And there is a blush on her cheeks. But there are also dramatic differences between the images. Where Ingres’ work is flawlessly realistic, finely detailed and smoothly finished, Picasso employs avant-garde cubist techniques and applies his paint in thick daubs of bold colours. Walter’s dress is reduced to flattened panels of vivid blue and white with a pinwheel pattern, and she holds an open book rather than a fan. Her face is seen both in profile and front view, her skin and hair are mostly green, and her breasts are exposed. There is a mirror behind the sitter, but in this instance the identity of the figure in profile is unclear. Could it be the artist himself?

The two paintings prompt us to reflect on creative inspiration. 

As Ingres was inspired by an ancient Roman fresco, so Picasso was inspired by a portrait he once saw at an exhibition. Both artists borrowed elements of pose, setting and composition. But both also made significant departures from the source material, making their work very much their own. Each painting echoed the other without copying it.

Pablo Picasso, ‘Woman with a Book’

Many years ago, when I was quite young in the business, a Creative Director explained to me that he approached every brief by thumbing through old D&AD annuals. He would randomly search for sparks and stimulus from historic award winners. At the time I thought this a rather derivative, and perhaps even cynical, approach. It suggested that every task had been set before, and every solution had already been written. 

'If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.'
Wilson Mizner

Perhaps I was wrong. Ideas need catalysts. We must open ourselves up to prompts and provocations from all manner of sources. And then we must take a leap.

When considering this theme, Apple founder Steve Jobs often quoted Picasso: 

‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’

However, it transpires that this thought derived, not from the great Spanish artist, but from a great Anglo-American poet:

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’
TS Eliot

Maybe it doesn’t matter whose idea it was. As the French film director Jean-Luc Godard observed:

'It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.'

'I look at you and I see
What I've been looking for.
Now it's very clear to me
We should be together.
You make me feel I could reach
For the impossible.
And knowing how much you care,
I'll be there forever.
You know I'll beg,
Steal or borrow,
To give you sunny days.
And in a hundred ways
I'll bring you love.’
The New Seekers, ‘Beg, Steal or Borrow’ (T Cole, S Wolfe and G Hall)

No. 382

Dora Maar: A Subversive Life

Dora Maar Untitled (Hand-Shell) 1934 © Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019

'All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.’
Andre Breton, Surrealist Writer

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the art of Dora Maar (Tate Modern, London until 15 March).

Henriette Theodora Markovitch was born in 1907 and raised in Argentina and France. Her French mother owned a fashion boutique and her Croatian father was an architect. She studied art in Paris and gradually developed an enthusiasm for photography. In 1931, with director and set designer Pierre Kefer, she opened her first studio. And she changed her name to Dora Maar. 

Initially many of Maar’s assignments were in fashion and advertising. Between the wars there was a burgeoning interest in women’s style, health, and fitness. As consumption grew, so did the appetite for bold, arresting images. This was a time when advertising walked hand-in-hand with contemporary art. 

Maar was naturally inventive and had an eye for the unusual and uncanny. A woman washes her hair and the lather takes on an alien quality. A lady removes her smiling face as if it were a mask. A model’s head is replaced by a sequinned star. 

Cecil Beaton Dora Maar behind one of her works, in her studio at 6 rue de Savoie, Paris 1944 Musée Picasso (Paris, France) © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

In one striking image Marr hand-painted elaborate tattoos onto an elegantly attired woman. For an anti-aging cream she superimposed a spider’s web over a model’s face. She had a talent for subversion.

‘Nothing is as strange as reality itself.’
Brassai, Photographer

Maar was active in left-wing politics at the time and developed an interest in street photography. Recording the poverty on the edges of Paris, travelling to Catalonia and London, she sought out the strange sights that surround us in everyday life. A wicker kangaroo wearing boxing gloves stands watching the traffic. A legless mannequin looks out from a first floor window. A suited man disappears beneath the pavement. 

'The unconscious must reign through the intellect.’
Eileen Agar, Surrealist Painter and Photographer

Maar established close relationships with the Surrealist movement that was then based in Paris and she became one of the few photographers to be included in their classic exhibitions of the 1930s. The Surrealists celebrated the power of the unconscious mind. They were fascinated by the revolutionary force of dreams, and believed that the associations we bring to everyday objects reveal our unconscious desires.

Dora Maar, The years lie in wait for you (around 1935). The William Talbott Hillman Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Photography had hitherto mostly been a medium of fact and rationality. But in Maar’s hands it was a vehicle for subjectivity and fantasy. Through extreme close-ups and bold crops she challenged the viewer to look afresh. Through unexpected contexts and dramatic angles she made cryptic images that questioned logic and common sense. Through carefully constructed photomontage she created bizarre and exotic new worlds.

A two-headed calf sits atop a classical fountain. A hand emerges from a conch shell on a beach. Eyes float across a gloomy sky. A child bends backwards on an inverted stone vault. And a baby armadillo regards us with sinister detachment. 

Maar teaches us to challenge rationality and convention at every turn; to construct and deconstruct; to subvert people’s expectations - of ourselves and the world around us. If we want to catch the eye, to arrest attention, to provoke thought, we need to see the strange in the everyday. We need to stop making sense.

Dora Maar, Man Looking Inside a Sidewalk

From the late 1930s Maar pursued painting as an artistic outlet. She created cubist portraits, sombre still-lives and melancholy landscapes. And then in her seventies she returned to photography, her first love, making a series of photograms – camera-less images produced by placing objects on photo-sensitive paper. With these moody abstractions, sometimes scratched and over-painted, she was asking questions to the last. 

Maar died in Paris in 1997, aged 89.

In support of International Women’s Day (8 March), this piece was written without any reference to Dora Maar’s famous partner.

'Isn't it strange?
Isn't it strange?
I am still me.
You are still you.
In the same place.
Isn't it strange?
How people can change
From strangers to friends,
Friends into lovers,
And strangers again.’

Celeste, ‘Strange’ (C Waite / J Hartman / S Wrabel)

No. 270

Picasso Drinking Gasoline: In Praise of Restless Souls and Inventive Minds

'Study for the Horse Head (I)', a sketch for ‘Guernica’ (1937)

'I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.'
Pablo Picasso

Picasso sits before his easel in a pair of shorts and no shirt. He is 75. He has been set the challenge of creating an image in 5 minutes with a new felt-tip pen. He sketches with speed and confidence - long fluid lines, bold squiggles, dabs of colour. He stares intently at his canvas. A bunch of flowers becomes a tubby fish, which turns into a jaunty cockerel, and finally a red-eyed faun.

‘I could go on all night if you want.’

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s fascinating 1956 film ‘Le mystère Picasso’ seeks to shed light on Picasso’s creative process. The artist paints on transparent blank newsprint so that the crew can film on the other side. He takes us on a dazzling, restless, inspiring journey.

'Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.’

The documentary features in the fine ‘Picasso and Paper’ exhibition, currently running at the Royal Academy, London (until 13 April).

Pablo Picasso, Women at Their Toilette, Paris, winter 1937–38
Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Adrien Didierjean

‘By chance I managed to get hold of a stock of splendid Japanese paper. It cost me an arm and a leg! But without it I’d never have done those drawings. The paper seduced me.’

For Picasso paper was a vehicle for expression that was always close at hand. It was a tool for preparatory studies. It was a fertile medium in its own right. He created on writing paper, wrapping paper, wallpaper and newspaper. He sketched on notebooks and napkins, magazines and menus, packaging and postcards. He drew in pencil, oil, ink, crayon and charcoal. He folded and glued, cut and pasted, painted and printed.

'I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’

The exhibition presents a torrent of ideas, thoughts and feelings, a gushing stream of consciousness. It takes us from two charming silhouettes of a dog and a dove, cut from paper when Picasso was nine years old; through his Blue and Rose Periods; through Cubism, Surrealism and Neoclassicism; all the way to a skull-like self-portrait, in black and white crayon, that he made at the age of 91. 

Dog, Málaga, c. 1890 Cut-out paper
© Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photo, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Picasso/DACS 2020

'To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.’

On the way we see countless fauns, goats and doves; matadors and minotaurs; harlequins and horses; nudes and portraits; lovers, jesters, cavaliers and circus performers. Picasso burnt two eyes and a mouth into a paper napkin with a cigarette to make a head. He created a plaster cast of a crumpled sheet of paper. He drew a cheeky leg on a Vogue fashion spread.

'Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.’

Picasso clearly had a phenomenal work ethic. He just kept producing fresh, original ideas across all manner of media. He couldn’t help himself.

'Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.’

And he wasn’t afraid of the absurd, the ugly or the obscene. His work is unfiltered, unfettered, uncensored. Freud would have had a field day.

'The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.’

When fellow artist Georges Braques first saw 'Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon' he observed:

'It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire.’

Picasso next to the cut and folded cardboard sculpture of a seated man for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / image RMN-GP © Succession Picasso/DACS 2020

I left the exhibition in awe of Picasso’s extraordinary appetite for change, his craving to create. He seems to have had a relentless desire to express ideas, to articulate feelings, to explore, to pioneer. He was indeed drinking gasoline.

'If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!’

Picasso was, of course, a unique talent and a problematic personality. But he still suggests some simple lessons for people working in the creative professions.

We should cultivate a restless mind - diligent, dynamic, determined; alive to new possibilities and fresh perspectives. We should not seek to check, edit or censor ideas before we’ve given them room to breathe. We should avoid nostalgia; never rest on our laurels; never look back.

'Action is the foundational key to all success.'

Above all, we should reach for a pad. Scribble, sketch, jot and note. Carry a journal, make a list. Devise a scheme, form a theory, hatch a plan, draft an idea, plot an escape.

Go on. Make it up, write it down. Now.

'I do not seek. I find.’

At the end of the Clouzot film Picasso expresses dissatisfaction with one of his images. He sets about over-painting it. ‘But what about the audience?’ Clouzot asks.

‘I’ve never worried about the audience and I’m not about to start now.’

'O, the wayward wind is a restless wind,
Is a restless wind that yearns to wander.
And I was born the next of kin,
The next of kin to the wayward wind.’
Sam Cooke, ‘The Wayward Wind’ (S Lebowsky, H Newman)

No. 269

‘Bring on the Dancing Horses’: What Can the Spanish Riding School Teach Us About Management?

I was in Vienna last weekend and attended a performance by the Spanish Riding School.

In the stately setting of the eighteenth century Winter Riding School, teams of manicured but muscular Lipizzan stallions, guided by uniformed horsemen and women, execute a series of disciplined manoeuvers. To a musical accompaniment the horses walk, trot and canter in harmony. They leap, pirouette and stand proud on their hind legs. It’s an extraordinary sight and is justly described as ‘horse ballet.’

I subsequently watched a TV documentary (Lucy Worsley’s Reins of Power: The Art of Horse Dancing) that explained that horse ballet, or ‘manege’ as it was called, dates back to the sixteenth century. The elegant dance routines have a military origin. As warfare evolved from the heavy-armoured medieval battlefield, to the more fluid, firearms-dominated combat conditions of the seventeenth century, the cavalry had to become more agile. They had to move in and out of lines of infantry, to change direction at the drop of a hat.

Manege was a method for training horses in the physical and mental demands of this new form of fighting. In the first half of the seventeenth century manege became a hugely popular sport for aristocrats across Europe with the time and money to devote to it.

I was surprised to learn that the word ‘management’ has its origins in manege. I wonder, can we learn anything about modern management from the equine activity that inspired the term?

Well, first of all, manege combines agility with control; it has a sense of elegance and finesse, as well as power and determination; a lightness of touch as well as supreme discipline. These ingredients might make the recipe for a compelling management style.

Secondly, just as manege developed in response to the combat conditions of its day, so it passed out of fashion as military practice moved on. In the English Civil War the manege-trained Cavaliers were defeated by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Clearly management styles must evolve as the context in which they operate changes.

Do we fully acknowledge that the management approaches of the industrial age will be increasingly inappropriate to the age of technology?

Are we nurturing management talent that reflects the commercial and cultural challenges of the future?

Do we need a new type of management that responds to this modern era of partnership, purpose and organisational change?

'First I'm gonna make it,
Then I'm gonna break it,
Till it falls apart.
Hating all the faking,
And shaking while I'm breaking
Your brittle heart.
Bring on the dancing horses
Wherever they may roam.’

Echo and the Bunnymen, 'Bring On the Dancing Horses’
(I Mcculloch / L Pattinson / P De Freitas / W Sergeant)

We’re Only Remembered for What We Have Done

The National Theatre’s production of War Horse has been in the West End for a couple of years now and it's just announced that the run will conclude in March 2016. It's a moving World War I story about the relationship between man and beast, and it has been brought to the stage with a magical deployment of puppetry.

War Horse also boasts an evocative folk sound track. One song, Only Remembered, is a contemporary arrangement of a nineteenth century Methodist hymn. In it the workers in the field consider whether future generations will remember them.

‘Shall we be missed though by others succeeded
Reaping the fields we in springtime have sown?
No. For the sowers may pass from the earth and its toiling.
We’re only remembered for what we have done.’

It’s a melancholy sentiment. In all likelihood the industry will forget each and every one of us as it moves on to address new challenges and opportunities. There’ll be no recollection of the artful salesmanship and articulate speeches; no memory of magnificent meetings, presentations and decks; no record of the hard luck stories and ‘also rans’, the brilliant idea that didn’t quite make it to production. All that endures is the work. The rest is noise. And ultimately our legacy is what we do, what we make, what we create.

‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’

No. 50