Riffing, Copying, Parodying and Pastiching

Not just private fun or public plagiarism

This hilarious post over at The Fence has got me thinking about what’s going on when we copy or riff on another writer’s work, because as part of a much longer creative engagement between the two artists, Cézanne copied his friend and mentor Pissarro's painting Louveciennes.

Some time in the 20th century, straight copying went out of fashion as a way for artists to train their craft skills, but it’s worth asking why the founder of modern European art, Cézanne, still did it. If he wanted to paint the place he could perfectly well have popped back to Louveciennes and set up his easel in front of the scene for himself. He could equally well have decided that this scene had ‘been done’ or even was ‘a cliché’, and he’d go looking for a scene that wasn’t second-hand, hadn’t already been done: a scene which he ‘responded to directly’, to use a well-worn phrase of our own time, one that enabled him to ‘expressed himself’. But he didn’t.