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work of past masters. He only did so more covertly. Perhaps reacting to this early criticism, he made his borrowing after this time less obvious until his masterful organization of past art orchestrated "Guernica." He said in 1935 “I should like to manage things so that one would never see how my picture was made” (Picasso qtd. in Leymarie 185).

After the successful reception of "Guernica" Picasso overtly reconstructed works by famous artists and now was praised for these parodies. He must have savored this triumph over his early critics. The copies from Cranach, Courbet, Delacroix, El Greco, Poussin and Velazquez of the last half of Picasso's production are totally obvious compared with works he did after 1901 and before the "Guernica" mural of 1937. He craved success and achieved that goal rapidly by his raids on art history. With the concealed help of the masters he conquered the Parisian art scene, outdid his rival Matisse and became the most famous and wealthy artist of this century.

Edouard Manet, the first artist working in the modernist manner in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had painted his versions of the work of Titian and Raphael. Following Manet's example, Picasso deliberately chose to make art history his reference. Like Manet before him, he worked from the compositions of the masters, thereby freeing himself from the bondage of creating from a perceived reality. At the same time he gained from the masterful formal structures which were concealed in the abstract. In other words, he avoided merely copying the appearance of the things he saw about him. His method was to look at the art of the past until he found something he wished to dissect as Cubism had broken up and recombined the perception of subject matter to present its new vision. Cubism had claimed for the artist a new reality. That reality was the process by which nature is transformed into art rather than the artist seeking the elusive illusion of representing perceived reality.

Penrose commented on this “During the years when Picasso was discovering cubism his faculties were fully occupied: he was completely dedicated to his new-found invention, and allowed himself no deviations. At the same time he was conscious of other modes of vision. His admiration for the work of great masters such as Ingres, and his careful study of their paintings in the Louvre during his early years in Paris, may at

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