Building a Condo

For nearly two years, [George Condo] was painting “into Picasso,” as he once described it—trying to understand Picasso’s language from within, so he could apply it to his own purposes. To some degree, he did the same thing with all the artists he admired—Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Cézanne, de Kooning. “I did fake Caravaggio studies and Cézanne studies,” he said, “and these were not respectful studies. If the art was good enough, I tried to destroy it. Yu have to be severe with art, because you don’t want to be a slave to it.”