Making and Faking

Picasso goes on a journey:  From Le mystère Picasso (1956) by George Clouzot

Picasso at work: he draws three circles. He adds spikey lines and they become a cactus. A looping line around the cactus turns it into a fish with an extravagant tail. Another swirl and the fish becomes a comical chicken. “I’ll add some colour,” he says, and with a few brushstrokes the cactus/fish/chicken has turned into a smiling mask with staring eyes. What a journey of discovery! [1]

A forger makes a brilliant copy of Picasso’s picture. We subject it to photographic analysis and see that to all extents and purposes the two images are visually identical. But do they differ in other ways?

Certainly one is worth more than the other; perhaps one is located in Paris and the other in London. But that’s not very interesting. More interesting is that Picasso had to make his picture before the forger could begin. 

The original Picasso picture and a visually identical fake of the same image

Then consider this: when Picasso was starting his picture, he knew how to begin, but he didn’t – and couldn’t – know how the journey would end.

On the other hand, when the forger started work, all he had to go on was the end point. His particular skill lay in knowing the end point really well and then working out how to get there. Let’s call this skill ‘faking’, and let’s call the painter’s skill – that of knowing the start point, and being able to reach out from there, ‘making’.

What’s the point of making this distinction? Imagine that you want a new kitchen. If you’re sensible, you’ll make sure that the design process is a making and the better you know your start point, the better your design will be. But when you hand the designs over to the carpenters, you will want them to understand exactly how they should end up and you want them to know how to get there: you want them to be, in our new terminology,  fakers.


You can see what could go wrong if you confuse these two ways of working. See also The problem with problems, elsewhere in this blog.


[1]    Le Mystère Picasso (1955) dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot Director of Photographie Claude Renoir, produced by Filmsonor, Paris, Distributed by Les Acacias, Paris