References to Art History

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Artists have always learned by copying, but some make the quotation the point. Vincent van Gogh, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889–90, painted versions of prints after Jean-François Millet, translating the peasants into his own swirling colour. Pablo Picasso made a series of 58 paintings in 1957 prompted by Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656), and Francis Bacon turned the same painter's composed pontiff into a screaming figure behind curtains of paint in Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953).

Recent artists stretch the reference further. Yasumasa Morimura photographs himself in costume and make-up as the figures of well-known paintings. Sophie Matisse repaints famous pictures with the people removed, leaving the landscape of the Mona Lisa empty. Sturtevant, from the mid-1960s, remade works by her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol's flowers, to question originality. Look for familiar compositions slightly altered, and titles that name their source.