Artsy Magazine Misquotations – 1
Pablo Picasso
“Good artists copy; great artists steal“
Some misattributions happen in an instant. Others evolve over generations. In a 1920 essay collection, British poet T.S. Eliot coined the modern version of this now-iconic maxim, averring that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Other cultural figures who have been credited with a similar sentiment include Russian pianist Igor Stravinsky (albeit modified for musicians: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals”) and American novelist William Faulkner. It was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, who began attaching Picasso’s name to the aphorism in the 1980s.
But this was hardly the most absurd of the Spanish painter’s many misquotations. In 1952, a columnist for the Washington Post wrote that Paris newspapers were “agog” with reports of a sensational confession recorded in Picasso’s studio. The famed artist had supposedly admitted that, lacking “the courage to think of [himself] as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term,” he considered himself merely “a public entertainer who has understood his times.”
This interview, however, was the product of a satirical novel written in 1931 by Italian author Giovanni Papini. His main character, Goggins, was a fictional half-Hawaiian business tycoon who traipsed the world conducting interviews with the likes of Hitler, Gandhi, Henry Ford, and—you guessed it—Picasso. Beyond duping the Parisian press and the Post, the fallacious quote would later feature prominently in LIFE magazine and The Guardian.
