THE PITHY SAYING HAS been around for a while, but for painters, Picasso is most quotable: "Good artists copy; great artists steal." Ever since the idea was put in circulation in the late 1800s, it has been a conundrum. What is the difference between copying and stealing?
In our times, literary plagiarism is clearly an ethical crime. By contrast, when an art student copies a work by a master—still routine in art training—it is considered legitimate, as long as the artist doesn't pawn it off as their original work. Some artists paint bona fide "copies" for sale.
The old copy/steal saying, somewhat apocryphal, reportedly has sprung from the lips of T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, William Faulkner and then Picasso and even Steve Jobs. But it does raise an interesting issue for painters. How much can a painter imitate, or "steal" from, another artist and still be within ethical bounds (if art has any ethics at all!)?
To start with, there is so much that has already been done in visual arts that it is almost impossible to avoid repetition. An artist who has studied art history, looking at thousands of paintings, can't help but be conditioned by those visual patterns. So from this vantage, imitation is almost inescapable, as well as the "highest form of flattery."
Modern art reasoned that it broke from imitating the past, and that's true as far as it goes. Interestingly, though, in some modern art, and especially as we get into contemporary art (1970s onward), painters often did works that "referenced" past icons: a stylistic updating, a contrived clashing of styles, or an ironic, back-handed, joke on things past. Think of Andy Warhol pilfering copyrighted photos (sometimes he was sued) for his silk-screen prints (which made him millions).
In 1973, the literary critic Harold Bloom wrote the essay, "The Anxiety of Influence." Citing John Milton, author of the epic poem Paradise Lost, Bloom said that just as the poem's character, Lucifer, had to fight against God for his own individuality, so too writers must fight against the great authors of the past, such as Shakespeare and Dante, to come up with something truly excellent and "new."
Bloom concluded that the struggle is futile. The truly great stuff has already been done. Applied to painting, that would mean there is so much great art already, successor artists will forever fail to excel, or truly innovate beyond, past achievements. As the mid-nineteenth century French painter Édouard Manet said, “Painting has been done, and Velazquez did it.” So Manet went modernist. Today, the frantic flight from what “has been done” can make “art” anything at all.
And yet painters continue. For visual artists, I don't share Bloom's worry about a paralyzing "anxiety" stilling painters. Most painters accept they will never do something on par with the Sistine Chapel. The present echoing the past can make life infinitely interesting.
Which bring us back to copying and stealing. Even the best painters, some at least, will continuously try their hand at painting something out of a Velazquez, Vermeer, or Sargent, just to stay in practice. Learning how another painter brought about a successful effect will only be accomplished by trying to do exactly the same thing. Thus, there is honor in copying.
At this point, the famous saying, "good artists copy; great artists steal," becomes ambiguous indeed. The suggestion here is that there's nothing wrong with stealing something in visual art if it produces more "great" works of art.
And what can be stolen? Well, types of composition, color combinations, themes, subject matter, a particular place or particular mood. This may be a secret process in painters' minds. On the other hand, some painters will openly admit that, by looking at another artwork, they stole an idea for something of their own.
So if there is an ethic in painting, it might go something like this. You don't make exact copies of someone else's work to deceive others that it is your original. That's hard a fast. Then we reach a gray area. Preferably, if one paints a landscape copying a photo in, say, National Geographic, that painting should not be presented as “original” art; the photo must be the artist’s as well. Next, in modern (or realist) art, a particular painter may come up with a branded style that gets attention. When that style is noticed, other painters imitate it to gain a foothold in that same market. Not exactly praiseworthy, but not quite unethical either. It happens all the time.
After these criteria, the field is open as long as the viewing public can tell that the artist, by imitating—or even plagiarizing—past art, is making some kind of "artistic" statement. That is not acceptable to everybody, so objectors have the right to call it copied, or "faux," art.
So that's where we stand today. If only those clever phrase-makers of the past were clearer on what they meant by distinguishing "copying" from "stealing," we wouldn't be having this conversation. Art, by its nature, seems to thrive on such ambiguity.