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Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire
Other features of Les Demoiselles were inspired by a painting owned by one of Picasso’s friends: El Greco’s seventeenth-century altarpiece Apocalyptic Vision. Picasso made repeated visits to see the altarpiece and modeled the clustered grouping of his prostitutes on El Greco’s crowding of his nudes. Picasso also modeled the shape and size of Les Demoiselles on the altarpiece’s unusual proportions.
El Greco’s Apocalyptic Vision
And Picasso’s painting incorporated more exotic influences. A few decades earlier, the artist Paul Gauguin had flouted convention by abandoning his wife and children and moving to Tahiti. Living in his private Eden, Gauguin incorporated indigenous art into his paintings and woodcuts. Picasso noticed.
Paul Gauguin’s Nave Nave Fenua
Picasso was fascinated by indigenous art, especially from his native Spain. One day, a friend of Picasso’s slipped past a sleeping guard in one of the Louvre galleries and walked off with two Basque artifacts, which he then sold to Picasso for fifty francs. Picasso later pointed out the similarity between the stolen Iberian sculptures and the faces he had painted, noting that “the general structure of the heads, the shape of the ears and the delineation of the eyes” are the same. Richardson writes, “Iberian sculpture was very much Picasso’s discovery … No other painter had staked a claim to it.”
An Iberian sculpture
A detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
An African mask
A detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
While Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles, there was an exhibition of African masks at a nearby museum. In a letter to a friend, Picasso wrote that the idea for Les Demoiselles came to him the very day he visited the exhibit. He later changed his story, claiming that he had visited the museum only after Les Demoiselles was complete. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable resemblance between the African masks and one of the most radical features of Les Demoiselles: the mask-like visages of two of the prostitutes.
Picasso mined the raw materials that surrounded him, and by doing so he was able to bring his culture somewhere it had never been before. Excavating Picasso’s influences in no way diminishes his originality. His peers all had access to the same sources that he did. Only one lashed these influences together to create Les Demoiselles.
Just as nature modifies existing animals to create new creatures, so too the brain works from precedent. More than four hundred years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs … Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own.”9 Or as modern science historian Steven Johnson puts it, “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”10
Whether inventing an iPhone, manufacturing cars, or launching modern art, creators remodel what they inherit. They absorb the world into their nervous systems and manipulate it to create possible futures. Consider graphic artist Lonni Sue Johnson, a prolific illustrator who designed covers for the New Yorker. In 2007, she suffered a nearly-fatal infection that crippled her memory.11 She survived, but found herself living in a fifteen-minute window of time, unable to recall her marriage, her divorce, or even people she’d met earlier in the day. The basin of her memories was largely emptied, and the ecosystem of her creativity dried up. She stopped painting because she could think of nothing to paint. No internal models swirled inside her head, no new ideas for the next combination of things she’d seen before. When she sat down in front of her paper, there was nothing but a blank. She needed the past to be able to create the future. She had nothing to draw upon, and therefore nothing to draw. Creativity relies on memory.
But surely there are eureka moments, when someone is suddenly struck by an idea that materializes from nowhere? Take, for example, an orthopedic surgeon named Anthony Cicoria, who in 1994 was speaking to his mother on an outdoor payphone when he was struck by a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, he unexpectedly began composing. In subsequent years, introducing his “Lightning Sonata,” he spoke of his music as being given to him from “the other side.” If ever there were an example of creativity originating out of the thin air, this might be it: a non-musician suddenly starting to compose.
But, on closer inspection, Cicoria also turns out to rely on the raw materials around him. He recounts that, after his accident, he developed a strong desire to listen to nineteenth-century piano music. It is difficult to know what the lightning strike did to Cicoria’s brain, but it is clear that he rapidly absorbed that musical repertoire. Although Cicoria’s music is beautiful, it shares the same structure and progression as the composers he was listening to – composers such as Chopin, who preceded him by almost two centuries. Just like Lonni Sue Johnson, he required a storehouse of materials to mine. His sudden desire to compose may have come from out of the blue, but his basic creative process did not.
Many people have figuratively stood in thunderstorms, waiting for the creative lightning to strike. But creative ideas evolve from existing memories and impressions. Instead of new ideas being lit aflame by lightning bolts, they arise from the interweaving billions of microscopic sparks in the vast darkness of the brain.
HOW WE REFASHION THE WORLD
Humans are continually creative: whether the raw material is words or sounds or sights, we are food-processors into which the world is fed, and out of which something new emerges.
Our innate cognitive software, multiplied by the massive population of Homo sapiens, has produced a society with increasingly faster innovation, one that feeds upon its latest ideas. Eleven millennia transpired between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Then it only took a hundred and twenty years to get from the Industrial Revolution to the light bulb. Then merely ninety years until the moon landing. From there it was only twenty-two years until the World Wide Web, and a mere nine years later the human genome was fully sequenced.12 Historical innovation paints a clear picture: the time between major innovations is shrinking rapidly. And this is exactly what you’d expect from a brain that bootstraps, absorbing the best ideas on the planet and making them better.
In refashioning the world, Apple, NASA engineers, Ford, Coleridge and Picasso all worked from precedent. But at first blush, it might seem that they must have done so in very different ways – after all, remaking electronics, cars,
