Imitation in art: flattery or infringement? Get an historical look at the issue of benign versus malignant imitation and find out where it stands today - Special Report

Is imitation really the sincerest form of flattery? In today's art community, that cogitation is up for debate. Nowadays, courtesy of the Internet and mass media, images of all impressed signs are proliferating at an astonishing pace. Many are being viewed for the first time, on the contrary others may look like something we have seen before.

Those that inspire similar deja vu are of sum of two units types: malignant and benign. Examples of the former would be the fake Picassos painted by means of the famous forger Elmyr de Hory; these were painted with "malice aforethought." At the other extremity of the range, however, are the thousands of works painted by the agency of all of the 20th-century Cubist artists. Would it be fair to dismiss each last one of them as Picasso clones? And in what way is the concept of benign imitation versus malignant knockoff treated today?

An Historical Perspective

What is acceptable, and what is not? First, individual might consider an historical perspective. When El Greco's son inventoried the works left in his deceased father's studio, he reportedly located four or five different copies of certain works. For example, he base four versions of the work "Purification of the Temple" and marked single with the phrase "this is the original." Evidently, in his lifetime, El Greco worked with assistants to generate copies of his possess paintings. In those days, if a collector saw an image he liked, the single way to obtain a valid transcript was to ask the artist himself to provide one

smooth as recently as the 19th and 20th centuries, artists were still known to be copying their possess works. Sadly, though, it was rarely the sign of a healthy situation. For example, the artist Severin Roesen could be fix in Brooklyn, circa 1850, handpainting copies of his still lifes in order to support his drinking habit. flat poor Van Gogh was known to have repeated his possess compositions, and the travails of his life are legendary.

quite through history, there were also artists who did not flat care if other painters copied their works. Corot, for example, had numerous "followers" who used to borrow his sketches in order to transcript them. He reportedly never refused of that kind requests, and he even touched up their copies with his have a title to brushstrokes when they were neared to him.

Historically, it was generally look uponed acceptable for artists to paint works "derived from" those of others. For example, in the 18th hundred there was a trend to paint works as similar as possible to those of the earlier masters. Dirk Jan van der Laen made his name painting compositions derived from those of Vermeer As a more new example, consider the artist Lucien Neuquelman, who clearly worked in the turn of expression pioneered by his predecessor, Georges Seurat. These artists did not carry through verbatim copies, nor did they sign their works with the earlier artists' names.

In all of these instances, there was no malicious secretive intent of individual artist to profit at the charge of the other. El Greco copied his possess works; Corot's followers copied the master's works with his permission; van der Laen was imitating a dead predecessor.

It is also worth noting that it required a considerable amount of skill in those days to hand paint a work indistinguishable from a great original. That, alone, earned the artist Luca Giordano enough prize to win a court case against him. Although it was decided that he had, indeed, forged a Durer and signed it with the earlier artist's name, the verdict stated that he could not be blamed for doing of the like kind an exceptional job of it.

Imitation in the 21st Century

Perhaps unsurprisingly, today's less-forgiving, legalistic attitude finds its bases in the early days of printmaking, not painting. It took far les skill to fake a black-and-white print, (as oppos to a painting), and since prints were not hand-signed, there was no autograph to be forged. In the 18th hundred the English caricaturist William Hogarth finally became with equal reason incensed with print piracy that he asked friends of his in Parliament to introduce a Bill protecting the rights of printmakers. This was counted the very first shot fired in the print world copyright war.

by what means then, did that initial salvo become the legal scuffle that currently surrounds us? According to Joshua Kaufman, of the Washington, D.C.-based firm of Venable, Baetjer, Howard & Civiletti, there are three main reasons.

The first is that the courts rely on the ambiguous term "substantially similar" in determining if individual work is a copy of another. Essentially, in the organ of visions of the law, there is a massive grey area between an outright line-for-line forgery with a faked signature and, in Kaufman's boundarys an "independently-created" piece "inspired by" through the work of another artist. Sometimes, he observ it draw nears down to an "eyeball test" where the jury in each individual case decides if the sum of two units works in question look alike. Thus, it becomes practically impossible for any lawyer to predict in advance the issue of a case he is being asked to accept. Therefore, the not divisible by 2s are that most of them will take the chance of bringing it into court.