Innovate or copy?

How often is something invented that did not yet exist? And isn’t using something existing, adding or withdrawing your own ideas to it, the most common way to find new ways? The famous, and controversial, Spanish Artist Pablo Picasso thought of this when he did a series of analysis of another Spanish Artist; the 17th century Diego Velázquez and his “Las Meninas”. Starting of the project he said (1952):

“If anyone someone set out to copy Las Meninas, in all good faith, let’s say, when getting to a certain point, and if the person doing the copying were me, I would say to myself: how would it be if I put this one a little to the right or the left? I would try to do it in my way, forgetting Velázquez. The attempt would lead me, certainly, to modify the light or change it, because of having moved a figure around. So, little by little, I would paint my Meninas which would appear detestable to the professional copyist; they wouldn’t be the ones he would believe he had seen in Velázquez canvas, but they would be “my” Meninas…”

The quote above is part of the exhibition at  Museu Picasso in Barcelona. In the part where his fifty-eight Meninas are shown, they start this section by showing Velázquez’s painting and on a layer in front of it, project Picasso’s artworks. In a pedagogic way you see how he added his own artistry and created something new.